Lectures on Ancient Indian Numismatics (Carmichael Lectures, 1921) c10.18.1

c10.18.1

Whether these denominations of coins were all prevalent after 350 A.D., the date assigned to the Yājñavalkya Smṛiti, is doubtful. By the word “denomination” I do not simply mean the ‘name,’ but also the ‘weight.’ The mere name of a class of coins may survive down to a very late period, but the original denomination cannot be said to have been preserved, unless the ‘weight’ originally associated with the ‘name’ is also preserved. Let us, therefore, see how long after the middle of the fourth century A.D., the coins prevalent in the Vedic and Jātaka times persisted—how many in reality and how many in name only. Let us first take the Nishka coins. The word Nishka, some of you probably know, is met with in the Amarakosha which, I think, has to be ascribed to the fifth century A.D. But, in this lexicon, we are told that Nishka was another name for Dīnāra. Dīnāra, I have already informed you, was a coin struck by the Kushana kings in imitation of the Roman gold Denarius. Thus, the weight of a Dīnāra as of a Denarius was 124 grains, whereas that of a Nishka, according to Manu, was 560 grains. The Nishka of the Amarakosha could not, therefore, have been the same as the Nishka of the Manusamhitā. It will thus be seen that, in the fifth century A.D., we have merely the name Nishka preserved but not the original denomination. If this is the case with the fifth century, it must necessarily be true of the thirteenth and subsequent centuries.