Minerals and Metals in Ancient India v1.c18.s4.1

v1.c18.s4.1

The silver sheets of Gungeria make one wonder whether the Gungeria culture had some link with the *Mahājanapada* tradition and the early Historical period, when punch-marked coins were introduced and the copper plates used to be made for inscriptions and land donations. One of the earliest copper plates is the Sohagura copper alloy plate from Gorakhpur district in the Uttar Pradesh in which the Mauryan inscription is in Brāhmī characters; this tradition continued in the post-Christian era. Bhardwaj (1979) analysed a piece of a copper sheet, obtained from Rajghat, Varanasi dated 600-400 BC, and found this to be 95.45 per cent copper, containing 1.75 per cent CaO, 0.96 per cent iron, 0.25 As, 0.15 Ni.