16 The Initial Coinage of Bengal. [No. 1, 



The Emperor Akbar's minister, Abfil Fazl, has left an official 

 record of the valne of gold in the second half of the sixteenth century, 

 at which period the price was on the rise, so that the mints were 

 issuing gold coin in the relation of one to 9.4 of silver. But a re- 

 markable advance must have taken place about this time, as in the 

 second moiety of the seventeenth century, Tavernier* found gold 

 exchanging against fourteen times its weight of silver, from which 

 point it gradually advanced to one to fifteen, a rate it maintained 

 when the East India Company re-modelled the coinage in 1833. f 



of the African observer's appreciation of money values in either case. His 

 special patron, Muhammad bin Tughlak, Emperor of Dehli, had, from his first 

 elevation to the throne, evinced a tendency to tamper with the currency, 

 departing very early in his reign from the traditional equality of weights of 

 gold and silver coins ; he re-modelled both forms and relative proportions, 

 introducing pieces of 200 grains of gold, styled on their surfaces dinars, and 

 silver coins of 140 grains, designated as adalis, in supersession of the ancient 

 equable tankahs, both of gold and silver, extant examples of which in either 

 metal come up to about 174 grains. More important for the present issue is 

 the practical result, that, from the very commencement, Muhammad Tughlak's 

 silver money is invariably of a lower standard than that of his predecessors, 

 whether this refers to the early continuation of the full silver tankah, or to his 

 own newly devised 140 grain piece, a mere reproduction of the time-honoured 

 local weight, which the Aryan races found current in the land some twenty- 

 five centuries before this Moslem revival ; hut in either case, this payment to 

 Ibn Batutah seems to have been made after the Sultan had organised and 

 abandoned that imaginary phase of perfection in the royal art of depreciating 

 the circulating media, by the entire supercession of the precious metals, and 

 following the ideal of a paper currency, the substitution of a copper simula- 

 crum of each and every piece in the order of its degree from the Dinar to the 

 lowest coin in the realm, the values being authoritatively designated on the 

 surface of each. This forced currency held its own, more or less successfully, 

 from 730 to 733, when it came to its simple and self- developed end. Taking 

 the probable date of this payment as 742-3 a. h. (Ibn B. vi., p. 4, and vol. iii., p. 

 xxii.), it may be assumed that the 174 (or 175) grain old gold tankah, which 

 had heretofore stood at the equitable exchange of one to eight tankah's of good 

 silver, came necessarily, in the depreciation of the new silver coins, to be 

 worth ten or more of the later issues. Pathan Sultans, p. 53). 



* "All the gold and silver which is brought into the territories of the Great 

 Mogul is refined to the highest perfection before it be coined into money." — - 

 Tavernier, London Edition, 1677, p. 2. " The roupie of gold weighs two 

 drams and a half, and eleven grains, and is valued in the country at 14 

 roupies of silver." — Page 2. " But to return to our roupies of gold, you must 

 take notice that they are not so current among the merchants. For one of 

 them is not worth above fourteen roupies." The ti-aveller then goes on to 

 relate his doleful personal experiences, of how, when he elected to be paid for 

 his goods in gold," the king's uncle " forced him to receive the gold rupee at 

 the rate of fourteen and a half silver rupees, whereby he lost no less than 3428 

 rupees on the transaction. Sir James Stewart, writing in 1772, also estimates 

 the conventional proportionate value of silver to gold, as fourteen to one — 

 " The Principles of Money applied to the present state of the Coin of Bengal." 

 Calcutta, 1772. 



f Prinsep's Useful Tables, pp. 5, 72, 79. 



