The Greeks in Bactria and India c13.33

c13.33

Much use has been made by some writers of the find-spots of coins in determining where this or that king reigned, but it is not a satisfactory form of evidence; I have sometimes been forced to use it in default of better, but coins travel in trade and almost any other kind of evidence is preferable. In many cases too the find-spots are unknown; at best we have only a very partial picture. The following rules seem sound. If a king has an abundant coinage which is found in many places over great distances, like the coinages of Apollodotus and Menander, that is evidence of a widely extended rule, but not evidence that he ruled in all the places where his coins are found. If the coins of a king with a very large coinage are never found in a particular district, that creates a presumption, in the absence of other evidence, that he did not rule there; but if the coinage be small, no presumption is created; and in both cases, large and small coinage, the absence of coins in a district cannot be set up against other evidence that the king in question ruled there. If only a few isolated coins of a king be known, the find-spots afford no real evidence for the locality of his rule. The belief that find-spots of copper coins are good evidence of rule, because they do not travel far from the place of issue, is unfounded; copper coins must have circulated regularly over all the country served by the mint of issue, which might be very extensive, and a good deal more than that can be demonstrated. There have been found in Susa 143 copper coins of Seleuceia on the Tigris,¹ and sixty chalkoi of an unknown king Tigraios, who if I am right ruled at Omana on the Gulf of Ormuz (p. 485); large numbers of copper coins of Kadphises I have been found at Taxila, where probably he never ruled;² and copper coins of the Ptolemies have frequently been found, not only all round the Mediterranean,³ but even at many places in Britain.⁴