JAN> — mar. 1858.] Numismatic Gleanings. 223 



the gold and silver darks, &c. The use of double dies appears to 

 have been adopted by the Greeks about the 4th Century B. C. 

 The art was transported by the Macedonian conquest into central 

 Asia. From the Bactrian colonies, it passed into Hindustan and 

 appears to have been carried across the Indus about two centu- 

 ries before the Christian era. 



The first known exemplars of such improved coinage are those 

 of the monarchs of the Sah dynasty, whose coins of the size and 

 form of a hemidrachma, are described by Prinsep as the Surashtra 

 group. So servile is the imitation that an attempt has even been 

 made to retain an imperfect, and now unintelligible Greek legend 

 on the obverse, whilst the letters on the reverse exhibit an antique 

 form of Devanagari. But the skill of the die-cutter rapidly de- 

 teriorated and the workmanship soon became barbarous, till it as- 

 sumed a new and purely Hindu type in the coins of the Gupta 

 dynasty. The era assigned to the Sah Kings by the latest autho- 

 rities is from about 180 or 170, to about 50 B. C* 



The progress of the art towards the south and east was very 

 slow. It did not come into general use south of the Nerbudda 

 until the fifth or sixth century. But this refers rather to the pre- 

 cious metals, for leaden die-struck coins are found in considerable 

 numbers, which appear to date somewhat earlier. Up to the 

 beginning of the present century the money of the trans-Gangetic 

 nations was noting more than lumps of silver, like the sycee of the 

 Chinese. China, although so much in advance of all other Asiatic 

 nations in the arts, did not possess a stamped coinage till after the 

 Christian era. Smooth pieces of metal which served rather for 

 weights than for currency, date according to Chinese authorities 

 from Kieng-Wang who reigned B. C. 524, but the earliest known 

 piece with the name of a sovereign is attributed to the Emperor 

 Wen-ti of the lesser Sung dynasty who flourished A. D. 465. f 



* Thomas, Jour. R. As. Soc. Vol* XII. p. 45. 

 f I. Hager, Description des Medailles Chinoises. The oldest known 

 representatives of value in Eastern countries were shells. The cowry, 

 cyprea moneta, even yet serves for purposes of small change in parts of 



