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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;EWC3, post: 3194255, member: 93416&quot;]Yes, I agree, and that is in line with Cribb&#039;s position.&nbsp; That an<b> idea</b> of coins began in the West (probably Lydia) and spread rapidly both West and East from there.&nbsp; Persia and Egypt kind of ignored it, at least for their central provinces, but it took root quite early in Afghanistan (450 BC ???) and then in NW India (400 BC ???) with these strange bent bars.&nbsp; Then very rapidly on to Gangetic India too.....</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>That is the position taken by the BM catalogue (Allen, 1936)&nbsp; but I am not completely happy with it.&nbsp; A double&nbsp; siglos is assumed to be very exactly 500 x 4/3 = 666g divided by 60&nbsp; = 11.1g - and I think that is what we find.&nbsp; But the early bent bars (the short ones) very often weigh 11.5g.&nbsp; It is pretty normal for coins to be bit under the theoretical, but just plain weird for most of them to be over weight!</p><p><br /></p><p>Italian work from the 1970&#039;s suggests a Hittite weight standard back before 1500 BC of about 11.8g.&nbsp; If that is correct then it is possible that Taxila bars are a version of that standard, and the Persian 11.1g standard is another different version of the old Hittite standard - but tweaked down to make it easily convertable to the old Sumerian standard - the one the Persians used for their gold (500g/60).</p><p><br /></p><p>This however is just a sketch idea - there is a lot we do not know.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Yes - but not quite.&nbsp; Some states, including Kuru, made uniface single mark coins from very early on.&nbsp; But the coin you show is rather special.&nbsp; If you look again I think it is obvious that the 6-arm symbol was applied after the triskeles and actually squashed it rather flat.&nbsp; The 6-arm symbol has a special association with Magadha.&nbsp; All the coins like this seem to come from just one hoard, and the best guess is that when Magadha over-ran Kuru, they captured the royal treasury and overstruck the existing coins there (on the back) - to pass as half-karshapanas in their own system.&nbsp; The chance survival of that hoard is all we know about that event.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>This is roughly Mitchiner 1978.&nbsp; I think it is wrong, and Pieper 2013 is closer to the correct answer - but probly we should leave that for another day.....</p><p><br /></p><p>Rob T[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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