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



lism of the designers, and the ignorance and crude mechanical imita- 

 tion of the engravers, their legends become mere semblances of intelli- 

 gible writing, and, as the plates will show, like Persian shikastah, 

 easy to read when one can divine what is intended, but for anything 

 like precision in obscure and nearly obliterated margins, a very un- 

 trustworthy basis for the search after exact results. 



The different mints each followed its own traditions, and the school 

 of art stood generally at a higher level in the eastern section of the 

 kingdom, especially when Sonargaon was held by its own independent 

 rulers. The lowest scale of die execution, exemplified in the present 

 series, was reserved for the capital of the united provinces under the 

 kingship of Sikandar (No. 23 infra). The numismatic innovations 

 of Muhammad bin Tughlak, were felt and copied in the south, espe- 

 cially in the reproduction of the titular legends, but his own coins 

 struck at the " city" — he would not call it capital — of Lakhnauti, 

 evince the haste and carelessness of a temporary sojourn, and still 

 worse, the hand of a local artist, all which short-comings may be 

 forgiven to a monarch who in his own imperial metropolis had raised 

 the standard of the beauties of Arabic writing, as applied to coin 

 legends, to a position it had never before attained, and which later 

 improved appliances have seldom succeeded in equalling. 



The Bengal Sultans, mere imitators at first, were original in their 

 later developments of coin .illumination, and the issues of the fully 

 independent kings exhibit a commendable variety of patterns in the 

 die devices, damaged and restricted, however, in the general effect by 

 the pervading coarseness and imperfection of the forms of the letters. 

 Then, again, the tenor of the inscriptions is usually of independent 

 conception, especially in the refusal to adopt the ever recurring 

 halimah, and in the suggestive mutations of titles assigned to the 

 lieutenants of the prophet on earth, whose names they did not care to 

 learn. So also was their elaboration of the titular adjuncts of the 

 four Imams uninfluenced by northern formula ; many of which con- 

 ventionalisms survived for centuries, till Shir Shah, in the chances of 

 conquest, incorporated them into the coinage of Hindustan, during the 

 exile of the temporarily vanquished Humayun. 



The standard of the Bengal coinage was necessarily, like the pieces 

 themselves, a mere imitation of imperial mint quantities, and the 



