India's Earliest Indigenous Coins Were Silver Pieces Cut From Sheets and Punched With Symbols, and One Taxila Pot Found in 1924 Held 1,167 Coins, Most of Them Punch-Marked, With Two Fresh Issues of Alexander the Great

In the 1924 to 1925 season, John Marshall’s team at Taxila lifted a small earthenware pot from about six feet below the surface of the Bhir Mound. The pot, under 7 inches high, held 1,167 silver coins and several pieces of gold and silver jewellery, according to the Archaeological Survey of India’s annual report for that season. Most of the coins were punch-marked Indian issues, the series that Richard Fynes, writing in the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies in 2015, describes as the earliest indigenous coins produced in India. The Reserve Bank of India’s museum page dates the series from the 7th or 6th century BCE to the 1st century CE.

A pot at Taxila with Alexander’s coins in it

Marshall’s report lists what was inside. Some coins were oblong bent bars, others were circular, oval, square, rectangular or polygonal, and a few were tiny circular pieces punched on one side only. The report says the variety of punch marks was so great that analysing them “will require a special memoir to itself.”

Three coins in the pot were Greek and fresh from the mint: two of Alexander the Great and one of Philip Arrhidaeus, his half-brother. A worn siglos, a silver coin of the Persian empire, lay with them. Marshall called it the first recorded find of Alexander’s and Philip’s coins in India. He wrote that the find confirmed earlier conclusions about the period when punch-marked coins circulated, and that the bent bars were in use at the same time as the square, round and polygonal pieces.

The pot lay in the second stratum of the mound, which Marshall had already judged to belong to the 3rd or 4th century BCE. Fynes, who gives the king’s name as Alexander Arrhidaeus, notes that he died in 317 BCE. E. H. C. Walsh, who later wrote the Archaeological Survey’s memoir on the Taxila coins, counted 1,171 coins in the hoard, as P. L. Gupta summarises him, and placed the deposit at about 317 BCE. The two counts, 1,167 and 1,171, differ by four, and both are given here as printed.

Cut from sheets, punched with symbols

Fynes describes how the coins were made. Thin sheets of silver were cut into pieces of a standard weight, and several punches were then struck onto one side of each piece, one at a time. That differs from the Mediterranean method, in which a blank was struck between two engraved dies in one blow. A coin in the British Museum, from Magadha and dated 350 to 300 BCE, has no portrait and no inscription, as the World History Encyclopedia entry for the object notes. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds a small silver piece from Rajasthan, 1.4 by 1.2 cm, which it dates to 400 to 300 BCE.

The punches were geometric or figurative. Fynes lists elephants, deer, bulls and human figures, and symbols familiar from other Indian art: a tree in railings, a sun or wheel, and a three-hill mark called the caitya. The Reserve Bank’s page adds that the motifs were mostly drawn from nature, with the sun, animals, trees and hills most common.

Fynes places the earliest of all among dish-shaped coins bearing a single punch. Later coins carry four punches and then five, on rectangular pieces. Gupta, analysing a 1945 hoard of 690 coins from East Khandesh in the Bombay Presidency, notes that each coin there bore five symbols. Four were constant and the fifth varied. Two of the constant ones, the sun and a six-armed symbol, appeared on every coin.

The hoard at Patraha

In 1913 a hoard turned up at Patraha in Purnea district, Bihar, lying in the bed of a small river and enveloped in a mass of conglomerate. The Archaeological Survey’s memoir by P. N. Bhattacharyya, published in 1940, says it held 2,873 coins. Bhattacharyya catalogued 1,703 of them and left out the rest because they were too damaged or too worn to classify. The memoir records the hoard as belonging to the Patna Museum.

Bhattacharyya found thirty different forms of the six-armed symbol among his coins. He sorted them into three classes by the marks on their reverse sides: one coin in the first class, those with a single bold stamp and counter-marks in the second, and those with many small punches in the third.

The names and the weight

Fynes writes that the original name of the coin was probably karshapana, a reading he credits to the numismatist Joe Cribb. Bhattacharyya notes that old Sanskrit texts call such coins purana or dharana, and he reports Walsh’s remark that the Jataka stories use the word purana, meaning ancient, which Walsh took as a sign the coinage was already old by the Buddha’s time.

The weight standard is argued. Bhattacharyya writes that the texts, through Manu, set the standard at 32 ratis, which he gives as 55 to 56 grains. The heaviest Patraha coin weighs 55.8 grains, about 3.6 g, and the lightest 38.5 grains. He observes that Manu lived long after the coinage began, so the coins may follow another standard, and he reports Bhandarkar’s view, drawn from a hoard found at Peshawar, that the weight fell by deliberate and regular steps through debasement. Gupta, on the other hand, argues that the coins of the 1945 hoard are of one denomination on the 32-ratti standard and that the lighter ones are simply worn.

The coin in the old texts

R. Shamasastry’s English translation of the Arthashastra has a superintendent of the mint, the lakshanadhyaksha, who makes silver coins in four sizes: the pana, the half, the quarter and the eighth. A separate examiner of coins, the rupadarsaka, regulates currency, and coins paid into the treasury carry a testing charge of one-eighth of a pana per cent.

In his introduction Shamasastry adds that Panini names the karshapana in his grammar at rule 5.1.29, and the pana, pada and masha at 5.1.34. From that he infers that this system of coinage was current in Panini’s time. How far the Arthashastra’s mint reflects the Mauryan court or a later period depends on when the text was composed, which scholars still dispute, as the article on Kautilya’s Arthashastra sets out. Panini’s own work is covered in the article on his grammar.

Who issued them

The Reserve Bank’s museum page says merchant guilds issued the coins first and states took over later. It divides the series into two periods, one attributed to the Janapadas, the small regional states, and one to the Mauryan empire.

Fynes reports that numismatists have given the four-punch coins to the kingdom of Magadha and the five-punch coins to the Mauryan empire. He then cites Shailendra Bhandare’s 2012 point that the symbols themselves give no evidence for naming an issuer. For the five-punch coins Fynes argues from standardisation and spread: hoards of these late coins are found almost across India, and plotted on a map they track the distribution of Ashoka’s inscriptions, a correlation noted by Elizabeth Errington in 2003. He concludes that only a ruler such as the Mauryans could have imposed that degree of uniformity. The rulers are covered in the articles on Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka.

Walsh suggested that the marks stood for the state, the king or local government, the place of striking, a religious sign and the master of the mint, and that extra marks might belong to the assemblies, village communities, janapadas or nigamas (trading corporations) in which a coin circulated. Gupta judged that suggestions of this kind are conjectures with nothing substantial in their support.

When the series began

Fynes sets out the competing dates. J. Allan, who catalogued the British Museum’s Indian coins in 1936, built his chronology largely on the Bhir Mound hoard and put circulation in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, with a possible start in the 4th. Cribb, in 2003, used a hoard from Kabul in which Greek coins lay with Achaemenid bent bars, which he and other numismatists see as the models for the dish-shaped Ganges valley coins. He dated the beginning to the 4th century BCE and called anything earlier than the late 5th century implausible.

D. K. Chakrabarti argues for an independent Indian origin and ties the coins to the spread of Northern Black Polished Ware, a pottery that he dates from the 8th century BCE. Fynes finds a start in the 7th century too early, since the relative chronology points to intense production over a shorter period, perhaps no more than 200 years, ending in the 2nd century BCE. T. R. Hardaker, in Gupta and Hardaker’s 2014 book, puts the start at about 430 BCE or somewhat earlier. Fynes follows Hardaker, while saying conclusive evidence is lacking.

Bhattacharyya’s memoir also records an older claim, Bhandarkar’s, that the coins date from the second millennium BCE. Bhattacharyya himself wrote that the period when the currency came into vogue could not be fixed definitely.

A cartload of coins at Bharhut

A roundel from the Bharhut stupa, now in the Indian Museum in Kolkata, shows punch-marked coins being unloaded from a bullock wagon and laid on the ground. Its Brahmi label, in Fynes’s translation, says that Anathapindika presents the Jetavana after buying it for a layer of hundreds of thousands. The story is told in the sixth book of the Cullavagga: the merchant Anathapindika covered the ground of Prince Jeta’s park with money to buy it for the Buddha and his followers.

Fynes dates the Bharhut panels to the Shunga period, the 2nd century BCE, on epigraphic grounds. He uses the scene to argue that coined money was in use in the Ganges valley within the Buddha’s lifetime, though he adds that conclusive evidence is lacking. He also quotes Hardaker’s remark that the coins “were in their time perhaps even more plentiful than the Roman denarius, judging from the numbers that survive today.”