Going Ancient - Karshapanas

Discussion in 'Silver Coins' started by hyphenated, Dec 31, 2015.

  1. hyphenated

    hyphenated Active Member

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    The Stackers forum tends to look to modern releases of coins, with subset interest in older numismatics (Sovs going back a hundred years or so), and vintage bars (over the last fifty) to name two categories. Ancient coinage is another subset in which, to be honest, I had little interest hitherto enormous variation, lots of fakes, high prices. It turns out I was wrong; at least to some extent. India has an enormously rich and complicated legacy of coinage, and it's amazing to me to pick up silver coins from around 1,800 years ago for around fifteen bucks. There is this extraordinary degradation in images, as invading societies picked up coinage that the locals valued and produced their own it looks as though Picasso was on the payroll through the ages as distortion piles on distortion and a king's portrait ends up looking like a dildo, whilst a bull becomes swirls around a rectangular core. Some of the coins of the thirteenth century are still in use in villages small enough that every trader knows that piece of silver is worth a kilo of bananas. Things got a lot more boring in the caliphates, as images were not allowed, and the script is pretty tough to decipher.

    The stuff I wanted to provide a few research pointers to goes way back, to the 3rd and 5th centuries BC, and comprises punched ingots. Silver was beaten or rolled flat, treated with alkali to remove impurities, then trimmed to weight (most Karshapanas weigh 3.4g less wear). There are some rounded or elliptical coins, but many were rectangular with a missing corner, as weight was adjusted. They were then punched whilst hot with typically 5 different symbols. No-one is entirely sure what they mean, although location and mint seems reasonably certain.

    There are fakes out there (Pakistan is an epicentre), but perceived wisdom is that there are so many (millions have been found in hoards) that the cheaper ones are not worth faking. So if you want to hold a piece of silver that was produced over two thousand years ago, has a code that remains to be completely broken, and just looks amazing, I refer you to this category.

    http://coinindia.com/galleries-magadha.html gives you some idea of what I'm talking about, or run an image search on punchmark coins.

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    Source : http://members.aol.com/dkaplan888/asok.htm (accreditation, link cannot be followed without AOL ID)

    Enjoy! :D
     

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