466 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [No. 5. 



rally of impure silver and cast, at once tell their own tale. It is at 

 Eawul Pindee that the best spurious coins are made,— paida kuhna 

 is the expression used by the men who bring them for sale — these 

 are of good silver, and the dies so well executed that it is becoming 

 every day more difficult to detect a struck forgery ; sometimes the 

 eye or the mouth of a face is faulty, very often the monogram, and 

 now and then there is a break down in the Greek legend by the 

 omission of the small omicrons, or the bottom loop of the letter B. 

 I have seen hemidrachmas of Azas and Azilies so well got up as to 



, be perplexing enough, but when they are offered for sale by twenties 

 and thirties, and purchaseable for annas, there can be no question as 

 to their origin." Nearly all the recent additions to Bactrian Numis- 

 matics, first made known to us, I believe, by Major Cunningham's 

 unpuilished plates, are common as forgeries : beside these, is the 

 Lysias with Eucratides style of helmet, first published in the Numis- 

 matic Chronicle for October, 1853, and I have recently seen a forged 

 Diodotus corresponding with Major Cunningham's supplementary 

 Plate, Fig. 6,* which affords a very convincing proof, it is to be feared, 

 that a white man and his brethren are still at their dirty work. 



" To commence a crusade up here against the trade, which it real- 

 ly has become, would be in vain, for there is not a money-changer 

 or shroff, and very few jewellers, (many of them possibly in ignor- 

 ance of the truth,) who have not laid in a supply of fabrications 

 under the idea that the Sahib logue will be eager to purchase. The 

 market being overstocked and the thing altogether overdone may in 

 some measure check the evil, but nothing save the civil authorities 

 setting their police at work to search the coining dens, and on their 

 seizing the implements, well punishing the perpetrators of this jal 

 sazi, will ever effectually stop it. In the meantime as it is beyond 

 a doubt that the fabricators do obtain information from such sources, 

 let me strongly advise collectors on no consideration whatsoever, to 

 send plates or drawings of coins to their agents in the Punjab or 



J^fw Provinces, for by doing so they very often unwittingly afford 

 instruction and assistance of the very kind it is our interest to 

 prevent." 



* With the Greek ( BA2IAE02 ANTIOXOY. 

 legend altered to. ( \_Basileos Antiochou] 



