JOURNAL 
OF THE 
ASIATIC SOCIETY OF BENGAL. 
Part I.— HISTORY, LITERATURE, &e. 
Nos. Ill & IV.— 1890. 
Notes on some of the symbols found on the punch-marked coins of Hindu- 
stan, and on their relationship to the archaic symbolism of other races 
and distant lands. — By W. Theobald, M. R. A. S. 
The coins to which these notes refer, though presenting neither 
king 8 names, dates or inscription of any sort, are nevertheless very 
interesting not only from their being the earliest money coined in India, 
and of a purely indigenous character, hut from their being stamped with 
a number of symbols, some of which we can, with the utmost con- 
fidence, declare to have originated in distant lands and in the remotest 
antiquity. 
In these symbols we may detect the forms which early men in the 
infancy of our race, adopted to give expression in a visible shape to their 
conceptions of the unseen, and to embody the crude but very widely 
spread beliefs which their speculations on such problems enabled them 
to evolve. 
The coins to which I shall confine my remarks are those to which 
the term “ punch-marked ” properly applies. The ‘ punch ’ used to 
produce these coins differed from the ordinary dies which subsequently 
came into use, in that they covered only a portion of the surface of the 
coin or ‘ blank,’ and impressed only one, of the many symbols usually 
seen on their pieces. They differed moreover in the appearance pro- 
duced, since as the punch was smaller than the coin, each device 
appeared to stand on the coin in a depressed area of its own, round, 
square, triangular, polygonal, or whatever was the shape of the punch 
Y 
