Money as Metaphor 4b - Money is Power, plates (original) (raw)
Related papers
New Histories of Central and South Asia
The British Museum and the Future of UK Numismatics
This paper was published after a single day event celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Coins & Medals department of the British Museum, at which I was asked to talk about South Asian coins. I wanted to spend the paper trying to explore ways in which new ways of doing (at least new for South and Central Asian ancient numismatics) history were transforming the stories told about the period I work on, which is primarily the Kushan dynasty. I talk about the use of die studies to understand numismatics and about the concept of a coinage tradition which was introduced in a number of articles by Joe Cribb. I even spend a few lines talking about wikipedia, and had I been more presient I suspect I would have spent more than that (since then I've had the chance to see a Wikithon at a public institution and become involved in a collaborative project which has highlighted both the strengths and weaknessess of just how radically different wikipedia's model is from traditional scholarship). Anyway the paper should not be seen as research but as op-ed on what I think is worth doing in South and Central Asian numismatics.
Notae Numismaticae, 2020
This paper focuses on a relatively unknown group of published and unpublished Roman gold coins and their imitations from India with a large gold plug placed behind the head of an emperor. This phenomenon was briefly discussed by Peter Berghaus, who rightly noticed that the size of the filling on those coins suggests that the purpose for placing such material into the hole was different than simply the repair of a piercing made previously for a piece of jewellery. He considers the possibility that the holes were made in order to check whether those coins were plated or not and were later refilled with gold so that the coins could return to the money market. I would like to present a different explanation of this phenomenon. I would argue that those coins were perforated and plugged in order to adjust their weight. Such an adjustment let them be used as money in the Subcontinent. Similar phenomena from various parts of the world and time periods constitute the key to understand the purpose of plugging those coins and those analogies are examined in this paper as well.
The Kidarites, the numismatic evidence.pdf
Coins, Art and Chronology II, edited by M. Alram et al., 2010
Presenting the numismatic evidence for the Kidarite Huns in the context of Classical and Chinese references to this group of Huns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The evidence shows Kidarite Huns ruling in Bactria/Tokharistan and Gandhara during the second half of the fourth century through to the mid fifth century.
Hard money and cashless economies - Medieval Bengal and the greater Asian world
From Mountain Fastness to Coastal Kingdoms: Hard Money and ‘Cashless’ Economies in the Medieval bay of Bengal World, 2019
Money in any society is a social convention, but in advanced societies it is also an institutional arrangement to measure and to settle debt. When stable institutions were involved, the clearance of debt often involved book-keeping entries or their analogues. In other circumstances, tangible money such as cowries might be involved. In contrast, a predilection for the use of coin was characteristic of statecraft practiced by ruling elites of a certain background. Prior to 1200, many of the major empires and kingdoms of India derived the majority of their state revenue from agricultural taxes, and often relied on intangible moneys of account to administer this system. Notable was Bengal, which was ‘cashless’ under the successive Palas and Senas (eighth to late twelfth centuries). In these monetary systems, tangible circulating media, where they existed, often comprised huge quantities of cowries. Increasingly after 1200, as the Central Asian model of centralized state formation expanded in India, this indigenous mixed monetary system was replaced by a coin-based one. Hence the Indian demand for coinage metals rose progressively and sharply from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.