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If the 34.8 grain of the first of these be multiplied by 160, it will give a return of 5568.0 grains, and accepting this trial piece, conditionally, as Fìrúz's novel half-Chital, it will be seen to furnish a general total of 11136 grains for the copper equivalent of the 175 grains of silver contained in the old Tankah, and confirms the range of the Chital at 69.6 grains, or only .4 short of the full contents tradition would assign it, as the unchanged half kárshápana of primitive

Chital of Fírúz.

مكنت خویش چون سلاطین اهل گيتي سكهاء طور عظمت و دور بچندین نوع پدید آورد چنانچه زر تنگه و نقره و سکه چهل و هشت گانے و مهر بیست و پنجگانی و بیست و چهار کانی و دوازده گانی و ده کانی و هشتگانی و ششکانی و مهر يك جيتل چون فیروز شاه بچیدین اجناس بي قياس مهر وضع کردانید بعده در دل مبارک بالهام حضرت حق تبارک تعالی گذرانید اگر بیچاره فقیران از اهل بازار چیزی باقي ماند آن و از جمله مال نیم جيتل ويا دانكي خرید کنند

دوکاندار دانکه خود ندارد اگر این راها گذاري ان باقي بر او بگذارد این مهر نیست از ضایع رود اگر ازان دوکاندار طلب کند چون کجا چه دهد باقي او دهد برین وجوه میان بایع و مشتري مقالت این حالت بتطویل کشید سلطان فیروزشاه فرمان فرمود که مهر جيتل که انرا اده گویند و مهر دانك جيتل که انرا پنکه گویدد

وضع کنند تا غرض فقوا و مساكين حاصل شود

The original and unique MS., from which the above passage is extracted, is in the possession of the Nawáb Zíá-ud-din of Lohárú, in the Dehli territory.

* I once supposed these two coins to be whole and half Chitals, instead of the half and quarter pieces now adopted.

It may be as well to state distinctly that the most complete affirmation of the numismatic existence of a Chital of a given weight and value, supported even by all anterior written testimony, in no wise detracts from the subsequent and independent use of the name for the purposes of account, a confusion which perchance may have arisen from the traditional permanency of the term itself, which in either case might eventually have been used to represent higher or lower values than that which originally belonged to it. Ziá-i-Barni at one moment seems to employ the term as a fractional fiftieth of the Tankah, while in other parts of the same or similar documents he quotes a total of "sixty Chitals," and in his statement of progressive advances of price, mentions the rise from twenty Chitals to half a Tankah. Ferishtah following, with but vague know. ledge, declares that fifty Chitals constituted the Tankah; while Abúl Fazl, who had real information on these matters as understood in his own day, asserts that the dám was divided "in account" into twenty-five Chitals. (See Suppt. Páthan Sultáns, p. 31; N. C. xv. 156; Ferishtah, p. 299; Gladwin A. A., I., p. 36.) Then again there seems to have been some direct association between Chitals and Kánis, as General Cunningham has published a coin which he as

yet has only partially deciphered, bearing the word lie on the one side, and on the other. J. A. S. B., 1862, p. 425.

[يكاني] مكاني

ages. To pass to the opposite extreme for a test of the copper exchange rate, it is found that when Shír Sháh reorganised the northern coinage of Hindustán, by the lights of his southern experience, and swept away all dubious combinations of metals, reducing the copper standard to its severe chemical element; his Mint statistics show that the 178 grains of silver, constituting his revised Tankah, exchanged against 40 dáms, or double chitals of copper, of an ascertained quadrupled weight of 323.5 grains each, producing in all a total of 12,940 grains of the latter metal, as the equivalent of 178 grains of silver, or in the ratio of 72.69 to 1; though, even in the altered weights and modified proportions, still retaining inherent traces of the old scheme of fours, in the half dám of 80, and the quarter dám of 160 to the new "Rupee."

It remains to discover upon what principles the new silver coinage of Altamsh was based. That copper was the ruling standard by which the relative values of the more precious metals were determined, there can scarcely be a doubt. The estimate by Panas of the ancient Lawgiver, the constant reckoning by Chitals of the early Muhammadan intruders, down to the revenue assessments of Akbar, all of which were calculated in copper coin, sufficiently establish the permanency of the local custom, and the intrinsic contents of Altamsh's Sikkah or of 174 or 175 grains, must primarily have been regulated by the silver equivalent of a given number of Chitals. Had the old silver Purána been still in vogue, the new coin might have been supposed to have been based upon their weights and values; three of which Puránas would have answered to an approximate total of 96 ratis; but although the weight of the old coin had been preserved in the more modern Dehli-wálas, the metallic value of the current pieces had been so reduced, that from 16 to 24 would probably have been required to meet the exchange against the original silver Tankah; on the other hand, although the number of 96 ratis does not occur in the ancient tables, the combination of the inconvenient number of three Puráņas into one piece, is by no means opposed to Vedic ideas; and there can be no question but that the traditional 96 ratis, of whatever origination, is constant in the modern tolah ; but, as I have said before, the question whether the new coin was designed to constitute an even one hundred rati-piece, which, in process of time, by wear or inten

tional lowering of standard weights, came to settle down to the 96 rati tolah, remains to be proved by the determination of the decimals in troy-grains, which ought to be assigned to the normal rati.

I now proceed to notice the historical bearings of the coins of the Bengal series.

Any general revision of a special subject, coincident with the discovery of an unusually large amount of new illustrative materials, owes a first tribute to previous commentators-whose range of identification may chance to have been circumscribed by more limited archæological data, the application of which may equally have been narrowed by the inaccessibility of written history, heretofore confined, as in the present instance, to original Oriental MSS., or the partial transcripts and translations incidentally made known to the European world. At the head of the list of modern contributors must be placed, in point of time, M. Reinaud, who, so long ago as 1823, deciphered and described several types of the Bengal Mintages, commencing with those of Ilíás Sháh (No. viii. of this series).* Closely following appeared Marsden's elaborate work, which, among other novelties, displayed a well-sustained sequence of Bengal coins, with corresponding engravings, still unequalled, though in point of antiquity producing nothing earlier than the issues of the same Ilíás Sháh, who had inaugurated the newly-asserted independence of the southern monarchy, with such a wealth of coinages. Next in order must be cited a paper, in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, by Mr. Laidlay, which added materially to the numismatic records of the local sovereigns, though still remaining deficient in the development of memorials of the more purely introductory history of the kingdom. I myself, in the course of the publication of the Imperial Coins of the Pathán Sultáns of Dehli,§ had occasion to notice two pieces of Bahadur Sháh, one of which proved of considerable interest, and likewise coins of both Shams-ud-dín Fírúz, and Mubárak Shah, whose defective marginal legends, however, defeated any conclusive assignment to their original producers.

Journal Asiatique, Paris, vol. iii., p. 272.

+ Numismata Orientalia, London, 1825, pp. 561-585.

Vol. xv. (1846), p. 323.

§ Wertheimer, London, 1847, pp. 37, 42, 82, and Supplement printed at Delhi in 1851, p. 15. See also Numismatic Chronicle, vol. ix., pp. 176, 181; vol. x., p. 153; and vol. xv. p. 124.

The chronicles of a subordinate and, in those days, but little accessible country were too often neglected by the national historians at the Court of Dehli, even if their means of information as to the course of local events had not necessarily been more or less imperfect. Two striking exceptions to the ordinary rule fortuitously occur, at conjunctions specially bearing upon the present enquiry, in the narratives of Minháj-ul-Siráj, Juzjáni, and the "Travels of Ibn Batutah," the former of whom accompanied Tughán Khán to Lakhnauti, in A. H. 640, where he resided for about two years. ** The Arab from Tangiers,† on his way round to China, as ambassador on the part of Muhammad bin Tughlak, found himself in Eastern Bengal at the inconvenient moment when Fakhr-ud-dín Mubárak was in a state of undisguised revolt against the emperor, to whom they jointly owed allegiance; but this did not interfere with his practical spirit of enquiry, or his placing on record a most graphic description of the existing civilization and politics of the kingdom, and further compiling a singularly fresh and independent account (derived clearly from vivá voce statements) of the immediately preceding dynastic changes to which the province had been subjected. So that, in effect, Ibn Batutah, with his merely incidental observations, has done more for the elucidation of the obscurities of the indigenous

*The Tabakát-i-Násiri of Abú Umar Minháj-ud-din bin Siráj-ud-dín, Juzjáni, has been printed and published in the Persian series of the Bibliotheca Indica, under the auspices of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Calcutta, 1864, pp. 453.) The chapters on Indian and Central Asian affairs, with which the author was more or less personally conversant, have alone been reproduced. The usual Oriental commencement with the history of the world, the rise of Muham. madanism, etc., being mere compilations from secondary sources, have been very properly excluded from this edition. A full notice of the original work will be found in Mr. Morley's Catalogue of the MSS. of the R. A. S., p. 17 (London, 1854). Several other works of native historians, bearing upon the subject of this paper, have also been made accessible to the public in a printed form in the same collection, among which may be noted the Táríkh-i-Fírúz Sháhí (the third king of the name in the Dehli list), by Ziá-i-Barni (Calcutta, 1862, pp. 602), and the Muntakhab-ul-Tawáríkh of Abd ul Kádir, Budáúni (Calcutta, 1865, pp. 407). The editors have unadvisedly, I think, omitted the early portions of the original relating to India, and commence the publication with the accession of Akbar. An outline of the entire contents of the work will be found in Sir H. Elliot's Historians of India (Calcutta, 1849, p. 305).

† An English version of Ibn Batutah's Travels (taken from an abridged text), by Dr. S. Lee, was published in the series of the Oriental Translation Fund in 1829 (1 vol., 4to, London). A new and very complete edition of his entire Arabic Text, with a French Translation, chiefly the work of the late M. C. Defrémery, has been issued within the last few years by the Société Asiatique of Paris (4 vols. 8vo., Paris, 1853-1858),

history of the period represented by the earlier coins of the Kooch Bahar hoard, than all the native authors combined, to whose writings we at present have access.

The merits of these authors may or may not appear upon the surface in the subsequent pages, as it is only in doubtful or difficult cases that their aid may chance to be invoked, but for the obscure series of the first Governors of Bengal, the one stands alone; and for the space of time intervening between the provincial obscuration of Násir-ud-dín Mahmúd, the unambitious son of Balban, to the revival of public interest in Bengal, consequent upon the subjection and capture of a rebel Vassal by Ghíás-ud-dín Tughlak Sháh, the chance traveller describes more effectively the political mutations and varying monarchical successions than the professed historiographers treating exclusively of the annals of their own land.

The following list of Local Governors has been compiled, the early portion from the precise statements of Minháj-ul-Siráj, the latter part from the casual notices of Bengal, to be found in Ziá-i-Barni, who professed to continue the history of India from the latest date reached by the former author, or from A.H. 658 to 753, being a period of 95 years, covering the reigns of eleven kings. The last-named work was finally completed in A.H. 758.

The arrangement of the names and dates of accession of the chiefs will be found to depart occasionally from the details given by Stewart,* in his excellent History of Bengal, but I have designedly sought to draw my materials independently from the original authorities, whom he was perhaps in a less favourable position for consulting than the student of the present day.

* The History of Bengal, by Charles Stewart. London, 1813. 4to.

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