Where Old Coins are Found

The few gentlemen who, to the daily routine of gathering in the Current coin of the realm, add the delightful pastime of collecting coins which are neither of this our realm nor of this Our age, do not generally know of the sources that supply the odd lumps and the curious bits which once were the lubricants of commerce and the tabloids of wealth. Their wants are usually supplied by the money-changer or the coin-dealer, and except for an enquiry, not often pursued, as to where a specimen was found, they are ordinarily content with following the policy adopted by those who have lost dogs,–thankfulness for the goods and repression of. idle curiosity. Gentlemen whose bank accounts are swollen might well afford to despise closer acquaintance with what forms the very marrow of their hobby-horse, but the man who has to finger his purse-strings with the delicacy with which the reins of a mettlesome horse have to be handled, would not minimise the value of a thorough knowledge of the sources from which supplies are drawn for him and his fellows. The artful counterfeiter is busy with his dies and has often established a mysterious, but none the less effective, understanding with the coin-dealer, especially because, in this country, collectors, though few, are indiscreetly liberal, the relations between the rupee and the sovereign are never cordial, and the rare old coins–good souls,–are so crudely fashioned that their features may be faithfully and facilely copied by tyros in counterfeiting. They bear, often enough, marks of their last resting-place and those are, in very truth, the evidences of their resurrection. Even gold coins, which rarely succumb to the chemical influences of their morgues, bear physical traces which speak clearly to their genuineness. The distinction between the spurious and the genuine is too real to render the knowledge an idle superfluity.

Old coins, in this country, are most commonly found buried in the soil. In digging the foundations for a house in an old village-site, the workman's pick strikes sullenly into an earthen pot containing a few jewels and a quantity of coins which some ancient denizen of the village had entrusted to the secrecy and safety of Mother Earth in fear of the numerous Karapatas who not only practiced house-breaking as a fine art but also wrote illuminating treatises upon it. Occasionally, it happens to be a bell-metal vessel or casket, and was probably the property of a person whose vanity would not permit him to give his coins a coffin so near allied to dust as earth. In rooting up a tamarind tree to provide a substitute for the village oil-mill, two small copper vessels, green with verdigris, turn turtle and their ‘treasure on the garden throw.’ Or, again, in following a lonely furrow in a field remote from the village, the sun-burnt plough-man finds his plough-share turning up treasure-trove more valuable to him than what King Janaka of Mithila came by in similar circumstances; it is wealth secreted from the eyes of prototypes of the Pindaris. The superincumbent earth has often crushed the frail vessel with its weight and become intermixed with the coins, nuggets and jewels.

The ruins of ancient monuments, such as temples or stupas, and the remains of extinct towers, found in every part of the country, have an interest to the numismatist, for by probing among them he might come across quantities of valuable coins, if he is aided of course by a great amount of luck. In a niche of a cell of a chaitya long buried under a mound may be found a number of coins along with inscribed seals and terra-cotta tokens and small articles of pottery. Probably a deposit of ashes close by, marking the scene of an ancient visitation of fire, yields fragments of chank-bangles, an artificial eye and a large number of coins,–some of gold, many of copper and a few of lead. Men who have heard tales of their village having in centuries long past been the capital of a Principality, find some confirmation of them in a coin or two being turned up by the impetuous heel of a buffalo careering across a rather elevated common. One villager, more enterprising than the rest, probably takes the cue, comes to an understanding with the village-officers, sallies out with his two able-bodied, sons by night and darkness, runs a shaft down at a likely spot and is rewarded with a find or a disappointment as the gods please. Many are the shrines in Hampi which have been ruthlessly broken into and torn up in the quest for secreted coins and jewels.

Along the east Coast of the Madras Presidency, in the sands of the beach, washed by the waves of the Bay, are sometimes found coins which are among the earliest specimens of the Indian coiner's art. A heavy downpour of rain on the sandy elevations fitfully rising just out of reach of the salt water, cuts thin channels along the sloping sides and permits a few coins to peep into the light. Or far in the interior, up a hill, along a water-course which flows past an old temple or a ruined fort, may be found coins together with some iron shot. Gold coins of a size little bigger than that of a dholl seed would be picked up perhaps in an extensive but shallow tank in a village bearing a very suggestive name–such as Sola-maligai, the Palace of the Chola.

These finds are often of a stray coin and generally of a small number, but occasionally it happens that a huge hoard is discovered by an unprepared tiller of the soil, very much to his embarrassment. No fewer than five coolly loads of Roman aurei were once discovered near Cannanore. Government took, at one fell swoop, a hoard of over 16,000 gold coins, worth about a lakh of rupees, discovered in a garden in Kodur, a village in the Nellore District, which was probably a sea-Port in the past. Such luck rarely falls to the lot of a numismatist, not even to that of a professional treasure-hunter, whether incorporated or unconvicted. Guided by local traditions and by an ill-understood inscription, some gentlemen formed the Trichinopoly Treasure trove Syndicate, about twenty years , to recover treasure which they believed to have been hidden under the Cholamparai Rock at the village of Puthur in Trichinopoly, but their optimism does not seem to have eventually matured in a dividend. It is accident not calculation, that brings to light a large hoard or adds a few specimens to those already known.