Lectures on Ancient Indian Numismatics (Carmichael Lectures, 1921) c9.9

c9.9

Unfortunately for India, this *Rūpa-sūtra* or science of coinage has been lost to us. The very word *rūpa* in the sense of ‘coins’ is scarcely met with in Sanskrit and Prakrit literature from the beginning of the Christian era onwards. The term *rūpa* we now find replaced by *mudrā*, but we do not hear of any *mudrā-sūtra* or *mudrā-śāstra*, bearing this signification. This is an exceedingly grievous and irreparable loss to the historian, and the only course left to us now is to recover as much knowledge of this science as we can from a critical study of the actual coins of ancient India that have been so far picked up and also from stray references to the art of coinage preserved to us in the works of literature. It is not impossible to reconstruct, in part at least, a science and history of numismatics from the sources just alluded to. To this task I will therefore set myself in this and the next lecture.