Lectures on Ancient Indian Numismatics (Carmichael Lectures, 1921) c8.51

c8.51

face of a coin, but a punch covers only a small portion of its surface so that the blank of a coin is impressed not by one but by many separate punches representing many devices and applied irregularly at various points. The face of the coin thus presents a curious appearance, consisting, as it does, of a regular net-work of symbols often overlapping. It had for a long time been thought that these symbols were the arbitrary marks of particular shroffs and moneyers and not assignable to any particular state or locality and that they were punched into these coins haphazard by these authorities as the coins passed through their hands.¹ Dr. D. B. Spooner was the first scholar to refute this view. In November, 1906 some silver punch-marked coins were found in the Government House grounds in Peshawar. Of these only 61 could be secured, and were examined very carefully by Dr. Spooner, who contributed a paper on them to the *Annual Report of the Archæological Survey of India*. In one place in this paper he makes the following remarks—"But my tabulation of the marks occurring on the coins of the present collection tends directly to a refutation of this view. The above mentioned group of 5 symbols occurs on 20 of the 61 coins in the collection, with one symbol regularly in each corner, and one, with like regularity the dharma-chakra, impressed on one edge and overlapping the nearest two. This alone would have rendered the old theory doubtful, but when it is added that in every case where the punch-mark on the reverse was decipherable it was found to be what Cunningham called the ‘Taxila mark,’ we have an invariable concomitance established between a particular group of 5 symbols on the obverse and a particular ‘mint mark’ on the reverse, which cannot conceivably be lacking in significance and which points decidedly to these coins having been the regular coinage of some one accepted central authority, and the symbols or their selection the recognised insignia of the same, not the private marks of individual moneyers impressed haphazard from time to time.”¹ Practically the same conclusion was forced on me when I had to examine the punch-marked coins, all copper, which I picked up in my excavations at Besnagar. Here I could detect at least three classes of coins corresponding to three distinct groups of symbols found on them.² And it is a matter of extreme gratification that Mr. Walsh came to the same conclusion from an examination of 108 punch-marked silver coins from an earthen ghaṛā—found buried in the bank of the Ganges at Golakhpur in Patna City, about 15 feet below the present surface of the ground. The interest of this find lies in the fact that the marks on the coins "occur in certain constant and regular groups on the obverse," though, of course, with a few varying additional symbols as might be expected,¹ and that these regular combinations of marks enabled Mr. Walsh to divide the coins into at least five classes. These discoveries of punch-marked coins with their provenances definitely known, give a death-blow to the theory that all symbols on them "were affixed haphazard by shroffs and moneyers through whose hands the coins passed," and give rise to the incontestable conclusion that they constitute "coinages" peculiar to three different provincial towns,—one belonging to Takshaśilā of North-West India, the second to Pāṭaliputra of Eastern India and the third to Vidiśā of Central India.