________________
150
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
( August, 1928
"It is also very interesting to watch the steady depreciation in weight of the coins of the successive chiefs of Maler-Kotl& in connection with the general theory of the evolution of coins. Thus :
weight of coin 'Umr Khan, 1768-78 .. .. .. .. .. .. 9 mdahas 4 rattis. Amir Khan, 1821-45 .. .. .. .. .. .. 9 » 2 » Mahbub 'Ali (Sab8) Khan, 1815-1869 .. .. .. .. 8. » 4 Sikandar 'Ali Khan, 1859-1871 .. .. .. .. .. 8 . 2
Ibrahim 'Ali Khan, 1871 to date (1878) “No wonder the Khansahib 'Inayat 'Ali Khan in the passage just quoted remonstrates against the practices of the Kotla mint.
"The present writer, as has been already noted, had the good fortune some five years ago (1884) to be escorted over the Patiala Mint, and to have been given an opportunity of noting what occurred.
“The Mint is an ordinary Panjabi Court-yard, about twenty feet square in the open part, entered by a gatoway leading into a small apartment doing duty as an entrance hall, the remainder of the courtyard being surrounded by low open buildings opening into it. These buildings, which looked like the rooms' of a sarai, are the workshops."
The method of coining in this very primitive mint was described as follows:
"I examined into the modern system of coining at Patiala, in the hope of learning something as to the ancient methods, as it is to be observed that the modern Patiala, MAler-Koţia, NábhA, and Jind coins have all the appearance of those of 1,000 years ago, and of being made in precisely the same way.
"The silver, after being roughly assayed, is cast into small bars (rent) by being run into trop grooved moulds. The melting is done in very small quantities in little furnaces improvi: sed for the occasion. When the bars are cold they are cut up by a hammer and chisel into small weights or gelnds, and weighed fairly accurately in small balances. These gelras are afterwards heated and rounded by hammering into discs (mutallis), and again weighed and corrected by small additions or scrapinge. After this the disc is handed over to the professional weigbman or wazankash, who finally weighs and passes it. It is then stamped by hammering, being placed between two iron dies placed in a wooden frame, the lower side (reverse) is called pain, the upper (obverse) is called bala. The dies are very much larger than the coins, so that only a portion of the inscription can come off, and the coiners aro not at all careful as to how wuch appears on the coin, provided the particular mark of the reigning ohiof appears. Is not this precisely what occurred in days of old ? It is to be noted that the inscription on the Patiala coins has never altered since Nadir Shah permitted the chiefs to coin in 1751, the only difference being in the marks of the chiefs on the coins. All the coins have been showing jalus 4, or the year of the reign 4," for more than 100 years.
"The only thing that the moneyers look to is to try and make the particular mark of the reigning chief appear. If they do not succeed, it does not matter much.
"Griffin in the same work, pp. 313ff., has a long note on the minte set up by the Panjab States at Patiala, Jind and Nabha under a farman of A.D. 1772 of the Emperor Shah Alam. And there is further valuable information on Paujâb coinage at Kapurthala in notes attached to pp. 505 and 510."
In the same volume of the Indian Antiquary I appended a long footnote to p. 278 on the transactions of the Eastern Section of the Russian Archæological Society relating to the find of a hoard of Bulgarian coins in 1887. This footnote is pertinent to the present enquiry and so I give it here in full:
"There had been already an atteuipt to coin money among the Mongols in the time of Changez Khan (Tiesenhausen).
