.THE INITIAL COINAGE OF BENGAL, INTRODUCED BY THE MUHAMMADANS, ON THEIR CONQUEST OF THE COUNTRY, A.H. 600 To 800. (A.D. 1203-1397). (Chiefly illustrated from the Specimens in the Kooch Bahár Trouvaille). BY EDWARD THOMAS, LATE OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY'S BENGAL CIVIL SERVICE. HERTFORD: PRINTED BY STEPHEN AUSTIN, FORE STREET. 1866. THE INITIAL COINAGE OF BENGAL. BY EDWARD THOMAS, Esq. TOWARDS the end of August, 1863, an unusually large hoard of coins, numbering in all no less than 13,500 pieces of silver, was found in the Protected State of Kooch Bahár, in Northern Bengal, the contents of which were consigned, in the ordinary payment of revenue, to the Imperial Treasury in Calcutta. Advantage was wisely sought to be taken of the possible archæological interest of such a discovery, in selections directed to be made from the general bulk to enrich the medal cabinets of the local Mint and the Museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The task of selection, and with it of inevitably final rejection, was entrusted to Bábu Rajendra-lál-Mitra,—an experienced scholar in many branches of Sanskrit literature, and who, in the absence of more practised Numismatists, courageously encountered the novel study and impromptu exposition of Semitic Palæography as practically developed in his own native land six centuries ago. The Bábu, after having assiduously completed his selections for the Government,1 was considerate enough to devote himself to renewed and more critical examinations of this mass of coined metal, with a view to secure for Colonel C. S. Guthrie (late of the Bengal Engineers), any examples of importance that might have escaped his earlier investigations. The result has been that more than a thousand additional specimens have been rescued from the Presidency Mint crucibles, and now contribute the leading materials for the subjoined monograph. An autumnal fall of a river bank, not far removed from the traditional capital of Kunteswar Rája, a king of mark in provincial annals, disclosed to modern eyes the hidden trea 2 1 J. A. S. Bengal, 1864, p. 480. 2 Col. J. C. Haughton, to whom we are mainly indebted for the knowledge of this trouvaille, has been so obliging as to furnish me with some interesting sure of some credulous mortal who, in olden time, entrusted his wealth to the keeping of an alluvial soil, carefully stored and secured in brass vessels specially constructed for the purpose, but destined to contribute undesignedly to an alien inheritance, and a disentombment at a period much posterior to that contemplated by its depositor. This accumulation, so singular in its numerical amount, is not the less remarkable in the details of its component elements-whether as regards the, so to say, newness and sharpness of outline of the majority of the pieces themselves, the peculiarly local character of the whole collection, or its extremely limited range in point of time. It may be said to embrace compactly the records of ten kings, ten mint cities, and to represent 107 years of the annals of the country. The date of its inhumation may be fixed, almost with precision, towards the end of the eighth century A.H., or the fourteenth century A.D. A very limited proportion of the entire aggregation was contributed by external currencies, and the imperial metropolis of Dehli alone intervenes to disturb the purely indigenous issues, and that merely to the extent of less than 150 out of the 13,500 otherwise unmixed produce of Bengal Mints.1 details of the site of discovery and illustrations of the neighbouring localities. Col. Haughton writes :-"The place where the coin was found is about three miles S.W. of Deenhatta, not far from the Temple of Kunteswaree (or KomitEswaree) on the banks of the river Dhurla. Near to this temple is a place called Gosain Moraee, a short distance from which are the ruins of Kuntesur Raja's capital called Kunteswaree-Pat, consisting of a mound of considerable extent, which has been surrounded with several ditches and walls, which are again protected at the distance of a mile or two by enormous mounds of nearly 100 feet high. The brass vessels, in which the treasure was deposited, were ordinary brass lotahs, to which the top or lip had not been fixed, but in lieu thereof the vessels were covered by canister tops, secured by an iron spike passing from side to side." I wish to explain the reservations I make in thus stating this total below that given in Rajendra lál's list of 150 coins of seven Dehli kings (J.A.S. B., September, 1864, p. 481). In the first place, I greatly mistrust the reading of the sixth king's title. Muhammad bin Tughlak was called Fakhrud-din Júnah in his youth only; on his first mission to the Dakhin in 721 a.h. the higher title of Ulugh Khan was conferred upon him by his father, but from the date of his accession to the throne of Hindustan, he contented himself with the use of his simple name and patronymic; no longer the "glory of the I or theالوثق بتائيد الرحمن faith, he was the far more humble المجاهد في سبيل الله فخر الدین conventional Ja (Zia-i-Barni, Calcutta edit., p. 196), both of which were so persistently copied by the independent Bengal Sultan. Certainly no such title as occurs on any of the specimens of the Kooch The exclusively home characteristics of the great majority of the collection are enlivened by the occasional intrusion of mementos of imperial re-assertions, and numismatic contributions from other independent sources aid in the casual illustration of the varying political conditions of the province, and of the relations maintained from time to time between the too-independent governors of a distant principality and their liege suzerains at Dehli. Muhammadan writers have incidentally preserved a record of the fact, that on the first entry of their armies into Bengal, they found an exclusive cowrie or shell currency, assisted possibly by bullion in the larger payments, but associated with no coined money of any description; a heritage of primitive Bahar collection, that the Bábu has selected for Col. Guthrie, with the exception of those bearing the names of Fakhr-ud-din Mubárak Shah. The second question, of the altogether improbable intrusion of coins of Muhammad 'Adil Shah ("new type"), I must meet in a more direct way, by assigning the supposed examples of his money to the potentate from whose mints they really came, that is, Ikhtiar-ud-din GHází SHAH (No. vii. infra), giving a difference in the age of the two kings, as far as their epochs affect the probable date of the concealment of this trouvaille, of more than two centuries (753 A.H. against 960 A.H.). The Bábu has himself discovered his early error of making Shams-ud-din Fírúz, one of the Dehli Pathans (as reported in the local newspapers), and transferred him, in the printed proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, to an anomalous position at the end of the Bengal Pathans (p. 483), while omitting to deduct him from the total number of "eight Dehli Pathans," which reckoning has been allowed to stand at p. 480. In the matter of date, we are not informed why this king should be assigned to A.D. 1491, instead of to the true 1320 A.D. which history claims for him. 1 Minhaj-ul-Siráj, who was resident in Lakhnauti in A.H. 641, writes چنان تقریر کردند که دران بلاد کوده بعوض چیتل روان است = 9 = Tabakát-i-Násiri, p. 149, Calcutta printed edition (1864). Ibn Batutah gives an account of the collection of the cowrie shells in the Maldive Islands, from whence they were exported to Bengal in exchange for rice; the gradational quantities and values are detailed as follows: 100 cowries. J=700. 12000. 100,000, four bustus were estimated as worth one gold dinár; but the rate of exchange varied considerably, so that occasionally a dinár would purchase as many as twelve bustus, or twelve laks of cowries! (French edit., iv., p. 121. Lee's Translation, p. 178.) Sir Henry Elliot mentions that "in India, in 1740, a rupee exchanged for 2,400 cowries; in 1756, for 2,560 cowries; and (in 1845) as many as 6,500 could be obtained for a rupee.' -Glossary of Indian Terms, p. 373. They were estimated in the currency scheme of 1833 at 6,400 per rupee.-Prinsep's U.T., p. 2. Major Rennell, who was in Silhet in 1767-8, speaking of the cowrie money, remarks: “I found no other currency of any kind in the country; and upon an occasion when an increase in the revenue of the province was enforced, several boat loads (not less than 50 tons each) were collected and sent down the Burrampooter to Dacca." As late as 1801 the revenues of the British district of Silhet "were |
