Lectures on Ancient Indian Numismatics (Carmichael Lectures, 1921) c10.4

c10.4

Now, the earliest stage of civilisation is taken to be the Hunting Stage. No form of currency belonging to this stage, such as skins of hunting animals, is known to us from any composition of the Vedic period, or from any other source. As the Hunting Stage passes to the Pastoral, and animals are domesticated, the animal itself, not its skin, becomes the unit of value. The most common of such animals in India is the cow which is found mentioned in the Ṛig-Veda. Thus there is a hymn in this Veda¹ where Indra, *i.e.* his image, is offered as a fetish for ten cows, and another,² where Indra is considered to be so invaluable that not a hundred, a thousand, or even a myriad of cows is thought to be a proper price. As the Pastoral develops into the Agricultural Stage, a number of agricultural products come to be used as currency, the most remarkable instance of which is corn, the staple food of a province. It is in this Agricultural Stage that commerce is found to develop itself, and a greater number of objects are found capable of being used as measures of value, such as garments, coverlets, and goat-skins which were so employed in the time of the Atharvaveda.¹ Mineral products also such as cowries come to be used first as ornaments and then as currency. You will thus see that traces of the various circulating media of these various stages of civilisation are clearly found even in the Saṃhitā portion of the Vedas and that they must have survived down to the Vedic epoch from previous stages of civilisation in India as some of them have no doubt survived to this day. But it is only when metals become substances for money that a fairly high degree of civilisation is supposed to have been reached. And clear references even to this form of money are contained in all parts of Vedic literature, not excluding the Ṛig-Veda which is the earliest.