Indian Antiquary Vol 48

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 43

APRIL, 1919 ]
NOTES ON CURRENCY AND COINAGE AMONG THE B RMESE
39
On the other hand, the old Indian popular scale was caught up by the Muhammadan invaders of the 13th century A.D. and transmitted by them to the Europeans and Indians of to-day. It has found its way to the wild tribes of the Indian and Tibeto-Burman frontiers and to ancient China itself, before the days of the decimal scale in that country introduced by the Mongols in about the 13th century A.D.-a circumstance that has deeply affected the modern Chinese commercial scale, which is nowadays the Malayan scale in form and nomenclature and chiefly decimal in character.
I have here spoken practically in terms of Troy weight, because the Far Eastern peoples have never separated the ideas of Troy weight, currency and coinage.
The two Indian scales may be thus stated for clearness as 96 rati to the tôla for the popular scale and 320 raktika to the pala for the literary scale : this last corresponding to 320 ywégyí to the ból for Burma, 320 hüng to the lamling for Siam, and 320 kúndari to the búngkal for the Malays.
In 1900 (Vol. XXIX, pp. 29 and 61) I published an elaborately illustrated article on the beginnings of Currency which took me all over the world and over all time, ancient and modern. In it I discussed the three points of Barter, Currency and Money in their earliest and simplest forms. Barter was defined as the exchange of possessions pure and simple : Currency as the interposition of an article in common domestic use between the articles bartered, the interposed article being the medium of exchange. Money as the use of purely conventional articles as the medium of exchange. That is to say, Barter ie the exchange of one article for another: Currency implies exchange through a medium : Money, that the medium is a token.
I then gave many instances of pure barter between savages and semi-civilised peoples und the civilised, and showed by instonces how the border between barter and currency was crossed. The process is not difficult, but the passing of currency to money involves getting over many difficulties from the use, for the medium of exchange, of. roughly measured natural articles of many kinds to carefully measured and officially marked manufactured articles, leading eventually to the use of gold, silver and copper money as the survivals of the fittest of almost every conceivable article tried at some place or at some time or other. A clear understanding of this fundamental subject is necessary to a complete comprehension of discussions such as that opened up by a consideration of the present enquiry or one analogous to it-that is, of the Currency and Coinage of any given country.
In 1913 I published in Vol. XLII, pp. 1-73, a long and elaborately illustrated article on the Obsoleto Tin Currency and Money of the Federated Malay States, which had Occupied my attention for some time previously. There were mysterious exhibits in museums of articles in tin, thought to he old Malay toys. A very careful examination, however, of all the available specimens showed them to be beyond question specimens of some system of a forgotten currency or money. There were antong them tin ingots on a scale and tin tokens, also to scale, representing the tin ingots-that is, these specimens. represented a tin gurrency and a tin money in use among the Malays. Other specimens were models of animals, also to scale, representing a former tin currency. These discoveries led to an examination of the literature likely to illuminate the subject, and it was then discovered that there was a long continued, though now obsolete, .currency and money in tin in the Malay Peninsula for at least 500 years up to quite ppcent times,