1835.] Continuation 0/ notes on Hindu Coitis. 685 



specimens from Lieutenant Burnes, who lately forwarded me several 

 coins, and afterwards wrote me that he had come on a further trea- 

 sure of them in the course of some excavations in Cutch. 



A few specimens of the new accessions, selected by Mr. Wathbn 

 at Bombay, did not add much to the variety with which 1 had already 

 become acquainted from the collections of Keramat Ali and Mohan 

 Lal, of Lieutenant Conollt, and especially of Colonel Stacy. Some 

 of these I have before made known : other varieties have been long 

 since published in Colonel Tod's plate of coins in the Transactions 

 of the Royal Asiatic Society, but there are many entirely new in the 

 plate I am now about to introduce to my readers. 



In the first place, however, I am pledged to prove that the type of 

 this series of Indian coins is a fourth example of imitation of a Grecian 

 original. The very style and beauty of the profile on some of the 

 earlier specimens, (figs. 1, 3, 10,) might be enough to convince an 

 artist or a sculptor of the fact, for we might in vain seek such accu- 

 rate delineations of the human features on any genuine Hindu coin ; 

 witness the degradation to which the very same device soon arrives 

 under its Hindu adoption. But a comparison with the coins of the 

 Arsakian and Sassanian dynasties of Persia, which are confessedly of 

 Greek origin, may go farther to satisfy a sceptic on this point. The 

 mode of dressing the hair belongs exclusively to Parthia : none of 

 the genuine Bactrians even have it, and in the whole of our Indo- 

 Scythic acquaintance, it will only be seen on the medals of Kodos, 

 engraved as figs. 11, 12, and 13, of Plate XXV. of the present volume. 

 In him the likeness is perfect, and him, therefore, I would deem the 

 progenitor of this Saurdshtra group, so similar in size, weight, metal, 

 and contour of the head. The marked distinction between the two 

 is confined to the reverse. Here a long Devanagari inscription, encir- 

 cling a curious monogram, is substituted for the standing figure 

 with his hitherto uninterpreted motto, MAKAP PAHGPOT. 



Apropos of this seemingly impossible Greek combination ; even 

 while I am writing this passage, the explanation starts to my imagi- 

 nation, like an enigma or puzzle laid aside for an interval, and taken 

 up by chance in a position in which its solution strikes palpably on the 

 eye, and the wonder arises how it could have escaped detection at the 

 first ! It may be remembered, that in describing the various mottos 

 on the reverses of theKanerki and Kadphises group, in my last notice, 

 I remarked a curious instance of the word OKPO " the sun," being 

 changed into APAOKPo, " the great sun*." 



* Mr.V. Tregear writes tome, that hehas just met with a duplicate of the gold 

 APaOKPO coin, plate L., fig. 6. It was stated to have been dug up by a pea- 

 4 T 



