Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c10.11.4

c10.11.4

As Sophytes does not use any royal title on his coins, it has been presumed that his coins were issued not long after Alexander’s invasion, when, though for all intents and purposes enjoying sovereign rights, he might have acknowledged temporarily the authority of the Greek invader². An earlier view regarding the prototype of Sophytes’ coins, not even completely abandoned now, is that they were imitated from a certain type of Seleucus’ coins; in fact such was the close similarity between the obverse of this issue of Seleucus I and that of the coins of Sophytes, that some numismatists were tempted to connect the two sets of coins in this manner. It is more correct to accept the view suggested by Rapson long ago that both were derived from the imitations of the Athenian 'owls'¹. But if Whitehead's suggestion that Sophytes was an eastern Satrap ruling somewhere in the Oxus region in c. 320 B.C. is correct, then these coins had no Indian connection.