A Numismatist of Note
Any archaeological find is twice-born. First: On the day the object is unearthed — it is brought to light, as it were. Second: when its mystery is unraveled—the how, when, and where—and the object is woven into the continuum of human history. Without this second birth, the first is incomplete, even irrelevant.
Pankaj Tandon, an economist-turned-numismatist from Boston University, has helped decipher the inscription on a centuries-old coin from ancient India — a finding could rewrite a key chapter in the history of ancient India. Coins are not passive relics; they are engraved arguments, which demand the same interpretive rigor as scripture or sculpture.
In 1851, a hoard of gold coins issued by kings from the Gupta dynasty was unearthed near the holy city of Varanasi, in northern India. The Guptas, who ruled from the 4th to 6th centuries AD, had ushered in the “Golden Age” of ancient India, a blossoming of the arts and sciences that produced the concept of zero, a heliocentric astronomy, and the Kama Sutra.
Gupta kings stamped their given names on the front of their coins and, on the back, an assumed name ending in “aditya,” or sun. On two of the coins in the hoard, scholars were able to read only the king’s assumed name—Prakasaditya, or splendor of the sun—but it seemed obvious that these, too, were Gupta coins. Few scholars disagreed. Without the given name, however, the mystery would remain for more than 160 years: Which Gupta king was Prakasaditya? When did he rule?
Tandon is a Boston University associate professor of economics by training and, by passion, a scholar of ancient coins—or numismatist. In 2010, Tandon, who specializes in coins of ancient India, which to numismatists includes what are today Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, set out to crack the puzzle of Prakasaditya. An Austrian numismatist Robert Göbl had speculated without substantive proof that Prakasaditya was a Hun, but most scholars had continued to regard the mystery king as a Gupta. Tandon began by scouring more than 60 images of the coin—additional specimens had been found over the years—but the coins had all been poorly made and not one image revealed the king’s given name.
Tandon spent the 2011–12 academic year in India on a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, teaching microeconomics at St. Stephen’s College, his alma mater, in the Indian capital, New Delhi. On weekends, he made road trips to several government museums in the nearby state of Uttar Pradesh to examine coins. On a visit to the Lucknow State Museum, he was granted a rare, behind-the-scenes tour of an uncatalogued collection of dozens of Gupta coins. With no time for careful viewing, he hastily took pictures of the lot.
It wasn’t until he got home and sorted through the images that he realized that one of them was of the mystery coin. And here, at last, were all the letters he needed to read the king’s given name—Toramana.
Toramana was no Gupta. He was a Hun, an invader whose conquests in northern India were believed to have stopped well short of Varanasi. The coin told a different story: the invader had not skirted the Gupta heartland—he had ruled it. Could the Huns have been responsible for the decline of the Guptas, in the second half of the fifth century? Tandon has provided historians with fresh evidence.
Enthused by his find, Tandon returned to India in the winter of 2015–16 on another Fulbright-Nehru fellowship to pursue other numismatic questions. His work includes cataloging coins of the Guptas—and of their predecessors, the mighty Kushans—in the government museums in Uttar Pradesh, which have the largest collection of coins from these two dynasties after the British Museum in London, and the National Museum in New Delhi. Tandon has been invited to collect new information about the Kushan and Gupta coins for scholars in an updated print catalogue.
Numismatics plays an important role in understanding ancient Indian history, says Joe Cribb, former Keeper of Coins and Medals at the British Museum and renowned authority on ancient Indian coins. Here’s why: Surviving written texts that feature the ancient history of India were created as religious or literary texts. To reconstruct the past, says Cribb, historians look to other sources, such as archaeological finds and inscriptions on stone and metal. Coins offer another form of evidence, requiring similar care and expertise in the interpretation of engraved words, symbols, and images. “This is where a scholar like Pankaj comes in,” Cribb says, adding that the BU economist brings a rigorous scientific approach.
Tandon, who earned his PhD in economics at Harvard, corroborates his numismatic findings with information he gleans from historical texts, inscriptions, and even sculpture from old temples. He has published his research extensively in peer-reviewed numismatic journals. Cribb has invited Tandon to collaborate with him on a catalogue of Kushan coins for the British Museum. Tandon began collecting coins as an investment in the late 1990s, when India was poised for growth. “As an economist, I know that in developing countries, the price of historically important cultural memorabilia is relatively low,” he says. “As the country becomes wealthier, the value of such memorabilia skyrockets.”
Once he acquired a coin, Tandon wanted to learn everything he could about it. As he immersed himself in the study of ancient Indian coins over a decade, their value went up, just as he had predicted. What he hadn’t predicted was that he would evolve from a collector into a scholar.
“Indian coinage is perhaps the most fascinating in the world,” Tandon says. “There are all these outside influences—from ancient Greece, Rome, Persia, and China—and there is all the indigenous evolution [of the coins themselves] over 2,500 years.” Ancient Indian coins conjure up marketplaces along the Silk Road, the trade route that connected the East and West; conquerors and their traveling mints; wars; and lost kingdoms. They depict kings and deities and animals (Prakasaditya portrayed himself astride a horse, slaying a lion) and feature one or more scripts: Greek, the now-extinct Kharoshthi, and Brahmi, the mother of most modern Indian scripts. Early on, numbers were written using letters, and the system for writing dates varied across kingdoms. The seeming inscrutability of it all appealed to Tandon, who is a devotee of the New York Times crossword puzzle. He knew the Greek alphabet, and over time he taught himself to read Kharoshthi and Brahmi.
But how did an economist break into the world of coin research?
What Coins Tell Us About a Forgotten Dynasty
As a collector, his first major acquisition was from a hoard of coins found in Balochistan, in present-day Pakistan, that had been issued by kings called the Paratarajas, who ruled the all-but-unknown kingdom of Paradan. They had issued copper coins with legends in Kharoshthi, and silver coins with legends in Brahmi. By scrutinizing the images and legends, Tandon came up with the chronology of the 11 Paratarajas rulers who, in all likelihood, ruled from around 125 to 300 AD. “Pankaj’s paper on the Paratas is an excellent example of the diligence and intelligence of his numismatic work,” says Cribb.
Tandon put the small kingdom back on the map. Then he dug up clues to help make it a living, breathing world. As an economist, he was curious about the source of the kingdom’s wealth. Searching through historical documents, he concluded that the secret of its prosperity was international trade. One export was a lavender-like plant called nard, which grew in abundance in arid Balochistan and fetched a high price from the Romans, who prized nard for its perfumery.
In 225 AD, the coinage of the Paratas went from silver to copper, a sign of the kingdom’s declining fortunes. Around the same time, with civil war raging at home, Rome’s trade with India suffered. The Roman economy was the biggest in the world, just like the US today, and a recession in Rome must have led to recession in India, Tandon hypothesizes. “Globalization may not be the modern phenomenon we think it is,” he says, “though the term is a modern one.”
Curating a Museum
Though he considers himself primarily a scholar, Tandon still collects coins. “You need to hold a coin in your hands and look at it from various angles to study it to your complete satisfaction,” he says.
Too often, though, when individual collectors acquire coins, they pass from public view and are unavailable for scholarly study. Twelve years ago, in an effort to help remedy the problem, Tandon established an online, or virtual, museum, CoinIndia, which features high-resolution images of nearly 2,000 coins from the Indian subcontinent, spanning some 2,500 years. Upinder Singh, the head of the history department at the University of Delhi, calls the website “a wonderful, unparalleled resource on the history of Indian coinage.” The virtual museum transforms coins from static objects into shared knowledge, accessible to scholars, students, and curious minds around the world.
In this century, there appears to be a third birth for archaeological artifacts —when the object, digitized and contextualized, enters public memory.
Read here. html.
Antiochos I
Silver, c. 266 BC
History Lesson: Alexander the Great (c. 356–323 BC) conquered vast swathes of the inhabited world, marching east with his armies from Macedonia to India. After his death, Alexander’s general, Seleucos Nikator, ruled the conquered Asian territory and established the Seleucid Empire. The general was succeeded by his first son, Antiochos. This is the only early Seleucid coin to carry a date, says Tandon. It specifies the month Xandikos (March) and the year EI (15). The coin was minted in the city of Ai-Khanoum, in Bactria, a key province in the eastern part of the empire.
On the front of this coin is the customary portrait of King Antiochos. Most of the other Seleucid mints had begun replacing the earlier image of the head of a horse, on the back, with the god Apollo years earlier. With this coin, the Bactrian mint seems to have made the switch as well.
Something must have happened to prompt the issuing of a new coin, Tandon speculates.
If the year 15 represented the 15th year of Antiochos’s reign, says Tandon, the date is March 266 BC. In 267 BC, Antiochos had his eldest son, who had been his viceroy to the east, executed on suspicion of rebellion. This coin, Tandon speculates, may commemorate the new viceroy’s arrival in Ai-Khanoum. Since it was the custom for Seleucid kings to appoint their heir apparent as viceroy to the east, scholars assume the king’s younger son, Antiochos II, replaced his brother on that date.
Kanishka the Great
Gold, c. 127 AD
After Alexander the Great’s campaigns, Greek rule persisted in Bactria (modern Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia) through the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, founded around 250 BCE. These rulers minted coins with Greek inscriptions and maintained Greek-style governance. Around 130 BCE, the nomadic Yuezhi tribes displaced the Greco-Bactrians. One Yuezhi leader, Kujula Kadphises, later unified the tribes and founded the Kushan Empire around 30 CE. The Kushans were a superpower of the ancient world, ruling a large part of India during the first and second centuries AD. Art and culture flourished under the Kushans and they were known for their beautiful gold coins.
Four and a half centuries after Alexander the Great’s arrival in India, Kushans still minted coins in the Greek style, with Greek inscriptions and icons of Greek gods. This early coin from Kanishka 1, the greatest Kushan of all, depicts the Greek lunar goddess Selene. Later, the king began putting local deities on his coins.
Tandon knows the Greek alphabet from his training in mathematics and can read the script on Kushan coins. On one coin he acquired early on, he read the legend—which includes the king’s name—and saw that an expert had ascribed the coin to the wrong king. Perhaps the expert didn’t have a specimen of the coin with a legible legend, Tandon says. His coin did. The king was Kanishka. Tandon published the correct finding.
Toramana
Gold, c. 460 AD
Unlike pennies from the US mint, ancient coins were struck by hand and so no two coins are identical. A specimen could easily be missing critical parts of the inscription—or legend—that would reveal who issued the coin and when. Numismatists often have to wait until a well-struck coin turns up before they can attempt to read what’s on it, says Tandon.
Coin scholars had studied various specimens of this coin for more than 160 years, but they were all so shoddily made that no one could read the king’s given name. On this specimen, which Tandon owns, it is hard to see that there is an inscription at all.
In 2010, Tandon began painstakingly tracking down pieces of the puzzle—an image with a missing letter here, another clue there. In 2012, on a visit to a closely guarded collection of ancient coins at a museum in northern India, he took a hasty photograph of what he realized only later was the mystery coin. It had the missing letters Tandon needed to identify the king as Toramana, a Hun.
P.S.
mere jeb me 5 futti cowdie be nahin hain aur mein 5 lakh ka sauda kar raha hun
Ever wondered about these “footi cowdie” dialogues in the Hindi movies? Apparently, cowrie shells were used as coins in eastern India not too long ago. Learned this and more as I wrote this article about ancient Indian currency. Read about economist Tandon’s work. html.