158 Hon. E. C. Bayley — 0« a Coin of GTiiyas ud-din A'zam SJidJi. [Aug., 



of the various reigns as generally stated by the historians. Mr. Bloehmann, 

 however, who has paid much attention to the subject, is inclined to assign a 

 somewhat earlier date, viz., 816 as that of the accession of this monarch, 

 which would involve a correction of nearly two years in the total of about 

 nineteen years, which the historians give to the three preceding reigns. 



The second piece of evidence is that of a coin of a king styling himself 

 Shihab ud-dili Bayazid Shah, which has been published by Mr. Bloehmann 

 with the dates 812 and 816. History is silent as to this king or as to any 

 one who assumed these titles ; possibly he was a pretender, or, as Mr. Bloeh- 

 mann has suggested, he was a puppet king set up by Raja Kanis, or some 

 other aspirant to power, who virtually reigned in his name ; his dates all 

 fall within the probable period of Raja Kanis's authority. There is one 

 coin, as I have said, in the present batch of Bayazid Shah, unfortunately 

 the upper part of the last figure of the date is out of the field of the coin. 



The third evidence consists in the coinage of Ghiyas ud-din A'zam 

 Shah's elder son, Saif-ud-din, whose coins have been published by Mr. Laid- 

 lay and by Mr. Bloehmann. Only one coin published by the latter has, 

 however, an imperfect date, but as that is a four, it can only stand for 804, 

 A. H. 



The coin which I have now laid before the meeting, adds a fourth piece 

 of evidence and professes to be, as already said, a coin of Ghiyas ud-din A'zam 

 Shah. It differs only from the coin figured by Mr. Laidlay as Fig. VI, j)l. 

 IV, in Vol. XV of the Society's Journal, in the date, which is remarkable, 

 being very clearly 812. Now, though the histories of this time are demon- 

 strably wrong in the dates they assign to Ghiyas ud-din, yet it seems un- 

 likely that the whole of the details which they give should be erroneous ; and 

 that his reign exceeded, by some twelve or thirteen years, the length univers- 

 ally attributed to it, or that he should have returned to the throne after it 

 had been certainly occupied by his son Saif ud-din, is highly improbable. 

 I do not, therefore, believe that Ghiyas-ud-din was alive when this coin was 

 struck ; in other words, I believe it to be a posthumous coin, struck by some 

 one else for special reasons in the name of Ghiyas ud-din. 



If so, this is by no means a singular instance of the practice. There is 

 an exactly parallel example, and a contemporary one, too, to be found in the 

 coinage of Delhi, as may be seen from pp. 328 to 330 of Mr. Thomas's ' Chro- 

 nicles of the Pathan Kings of Delhi,' where it is demonstrated that Daulat 

 Khan Lodi and Khizr Khan struck coins in the name of their deceased prede- 

 cessors, though with the correct date of the year in which the coins were 

 minted. Mr. Thomas refers to a similar case in the adoption by the East 

 India Company of Shah 'Alam's coinage, though ultimately the Company 

 contented itself with reproducing the coinage of Shah 'Alam's nineteenth 

 year. 



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