Lectures on Ancient Indian Numismatics (Carmichael Lectures, 1921) c9.61.2

c9.61.2

Owing to the enhancement of the price of copper, the weight of these copper Dāms, as I told you, had to be curtailed by as much as seven Māshas. A similar cause may have operated, as I also then told you, in reducing the weight of copper Kārshāpaṇa and its tokens at some periods in the ancient town of Vidiśā and may thus explain in one way the discrepancy of weight in that class of coinage. Such also must have been the case in the time of Kauṭilya. I told you a short while ago that Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra allowed as much as 31·25 p.c. of alloy in silver coins, whereas the silver Kārṣāpaṇas assayed by Cunningham contained only 20 p.c. of it. This means that during the period when Kauṭilya lived, silver had become so expensive that economic exigencies necessitated a higher percentage of alloy being mixed with it in order that the original standard of value might be maintained. This admixture of a larger percentage of alloy is perfectly intelligible and justifiable, and this can hardly be called debasement of coinage. But I am not here referring to such cases, but rather to those cases where deterioration or sophistication of the currency was deliberate and was necessitated by the exhausted condition of the state treasury or by the disturbed political condition of the country. Thus if Kauṭilya prescribes that silver coins shall comprise 31·25 p.c. of alloy, one can only infer that in his time silver had augmented in value.