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SEPTEMBER, 1897.] CURRENCY AND COINAGE AMONG THE BURMESE
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Now, as far as I can understand, the músako (Skr, máshaka) was a weight of gold, the kahápanam (Skr. kárshápaña) was a weight of various metals, i, e., a bullion weight, pure and simple, and the kákaniki (Skr. kákiniká), was a very small weight, an atom. I would, therefore, take it that values were, when these Játakas were put together, simply expressed by weight, leaving the audience to gather the metal referred to from the context or from their imagina. tions.
Dinga and Tickal. In an enquiry of the present kind, the words dinge, a coin, and tiokal, the standard Alsoal weight, must necessarily be of frequent occurrence. Their origin is, therefore, point of importance, and it will be found on investigation to be exceedingly interesting in every way.
I have, therefore, here collected most of the information regarding them that has come my way.
The very numerous quotations which follow prove that the Burm980 word dinga, & ooin, and the Anglo-Indian word tiokal, the standerd weight, are, curiously enough. both direct descendants of the same Indian word, teiks, and have come to express respectively the two senses in which that word was used, viz., the standard weight and the coin which expressed that weight.
In order to make good the above statement it will be necessary to trace, century by century, the history of the word dingá, and then the history of the word tickal in the same way. The great diffoulty in the identification of tiokal with taka = tańka lies in the final 1, and in order to shew how this letter came to be introduced into it, it will be necessary to consider the history of the many curious forms that the Burmese words sitkd and yongdo have assumed in the writings of Earopeans about the Far East.
To proceed first to consider the derivation of dingá from ļanka :
DINGA. In my quotations I have followed the wide-spread word tanka, in its many forms, in over 100 quotations extending over 1,000 years and throughout the entire Eastern World from Russia and Hungary to China, through Persia, Turkestan, all India and Tibet and throagh the Indian Archipelego as far as the Moluocas, the Malay Peninsula, Burma and the Shân States. And there can be no doubt that the Burmese, in their word dinga, have merely adopted one forin of the universal tanka, & word of ancient Indian origin and usage for a weight and coin. There can also be little doubt that take and tanks are essentially the same word and often used to express the same meaning. Later on I will shew that take and tickal have the same deriva. tion, hence it follows that dinga and tiokal are but variant forms of one original word.
With the Indian word tanka, in its forms of tank, dańk, dangh and so on, have been confounded, naturally enough, another series of words of analogous sense and usage derived from the Arabic danag, a small weight; while at least one Prakritic word, tok or thðk, a measure of land, seems to have been confounded with take.
c. 832. -"Gold and silver are used as money, the shape of which is crescent-like: it in called tông-k'a t'o and also tsah-tan-t'o." - list. of the Tang Dynasty in Purker, Burmu Relations with China, p. 15
1027-28.-Y.25 s. v. tanga. "In the Lathore coinage of Mahmûl of Ghazni, A. H. 418-419, we find on the Skr. legend of the reverse the word tanks in correspondence with the dirham of the Arabic of the obverse." - Thomas, Pathan Kings, p. 49.
* That is () previous to 350 B. C.
By Y. is meant a reference to Yule's Hobson-Jobson.
