2. Comment on the economic advancement in the period through the case study of different coins found from the period.
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Here is how a several centuries–old coin may rewrite a key chapter in the history of ancient India: In 1851, a hoard of gold coins issued by several kings from the Gupta dynasty was unearthed near the holy city of Varanasi, in northern India. The Guptas, who ruled from the 4th to 6th centuries AD, ushered in the Golden Age of ancient India, a blossoming of the arts and sciences that produced the concept of zero, a heliocentric astronomy, and the Kama Sutra.
Gupta kings stamped their given names on the front of their coins and, on the back, an assumed name ending in “aditya,” or sun. On two of the coins in the hoard, scholars were able to read only the king’s assumed name—Prakasaditya, or splendor of the sun—but it seemed obvious that these, too, were Gupta coins. Few scholars disagreed. Without the given name, however, the mystery would remain for more than 160 years: Which Gupta king was Prakasaditya? When did he rule?
Ancient Indian coins conjure up marketplaces along the Silk Road, the trade route that connected the East and West; conquerors and their traveling mints; wars; and lost kingdoms.
Pankaj Tandon is a Boston University associate professor of economics by training and, by passion, a scholar of ancient coins—or numismatist. In 2010, Tandon, who specializes in coins of ancient India, which to numismatists includes what are today Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, set out to crack the puzzle of Prakasaditya. In 1990, an Austrian numismatist named Robert Göbl had speculated without substantive proof that Prakasaditya was a Hun, but most scholars had continued to regard the mystery king as a Gupta. Tandon began by scouring more than 60 images of the coin—additional specimens had been found over the years—but the coins had all been poorly made and not one image revealed the king’s given name.
Tandon spent the 2011–12 academic year in India on a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, teaching microeconomics at St. Stephen’s College, his alma mater, in the capital of New Delhi. On weekends, he made road trips to several government museums in the nearby state of Uttar Pradesh to examine coins. On a visit to the Lucknow State Museum, he was given a rare, behind-the-scenes tour of an uncatalogued collection of dozens of Gupta coins. With no time for careful viewing, he hastily took pictures of the lot.
Tandon
A numismatist is like a detective, reading coins—the designs, words, dates, symbols—in search of clues.
It wasn’t until he got home and sorted through the images that he realized that one of them was of the mystery coin. And here, at last, were all the letters he needed to read the king’s given name—Toramana. He was no Gupta. Toramana was a Hun, an invader whose conquests in northern India were believed to have stopped well short of Varanasi.
It was a surprising discovery. What were the coins of an archrival doing in the heart of the Gupta empire? Could the Huns have been responsible for the decline of the Guptas, in the second half of the fifth century?
Tandon returned to India in the winter of 2015–16 on another Fulbright-Nehru fellowship to pursue these and other numismatic questions. His work includes cataloging coins of the Guptas—and of their predecessors, the mighty Kushans—in the government museums in Uttar Pradesh, which have the largest collection of coins from these two dynasties after the British Museum in London, and the National Museum in New Delhi. Tandon has been invited to collect new information about the Kushan and Gupta coins for scholars in an updated print catalogue.
Numismatics plays an important role in understanding ancient Indian history, says Joe Cribb, former Keeper of Coins and Medals at the British Museum and renowned authority on ancient Indian coins. Here’s why: Surviving written texts that feature the ancient history of India were created as religious or literary texts. To reconstruct the past, says Cribb, historians look to other sources, such as archaeological finds and inscriptions on stone and metal. Coins offer another form of evidence, requiring similar care and expertise in the interpretation of engraved words, symbols, and images. “This is where a scholar like Pankaj comes in,” Cribb says, adding that the BU economist brings a rigorous
WHAT COINS TELL US ABOUT A FORGOTTEN DYNASTY
His first major acquisition was from a hoard of coins found in Balochistan, in present-day Pakistan, that had been issued by kings called the Paratarajas, who ruled the all-but-unknown kingdom of Paradan. They had issued copper coins with legends in Kharoshthi, and silver coins with legends in Brahmi. By scrutinizing the images and legends, Tandon came up with the chronology of the 11 Paratarajas rulers who, in all likelihood, ruled from around 125 to 300 AD. “Pankaj’s paper on the Paratas is an excellent example of the diligence and intelligence of his numismatic work,” says
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The coins of medieval England are far more standardised than many of their early medieval forebears, and give details of the issuing mints and, until the late 13th century, the moneyer of the coins.