Chapter I: Coins of the Huns and Indo-Sassanians

The military occupation of India by the Huns, or Hūṇas, lasted but thirty years. By A.D. 500 Toramāṇa, leader of the tribe known as the White Huns or Ephthalites, had established himself in Mālwā. On his death, two years later, his successor, Mihiragula, completed the conquest of Northern India, fixing his capital at Śākala (Siālkōt) in the Panjāb, but was driven out by a confederacy of Hindu princes under the leadership of Yasodharman of Mālwā in A.D. 528. He thereupon seized the kingdom of Kashmīr, where he ruled till his death in 542. Probably there were other Hūṇa chiefs who struck coins in India, but the legends on their coins are so fragmentary that their names have not as yet been satisfactorily deciphered. On some of the earliest Hūṇa imitations of Sassanian silver coins, for example, the legend _Shāhī Javūvlah_ appears, but whether this is the name of a king or merely a title is uncertain. No Hūṇa coins show any originality of design. The majority are either imitated from or restruck upon Sassanian silver pieces. The heads of both Toramāṇa and Mihiragula (Pl. VI, 4) on the obverse are coarse and brutal to the last degree; on the reverse appear the usual Sassanian fire-altar and attendants; the inscriptions are generally in Nāgarī script. Toramāṇa also copied the silver coinage of the Maukharīs (Pl. VI, 7). The copper of both princes show traces of Sassanian and Gupta influence; the reverses especially recall the fabric of Chandragupta II’s copper issues. Kushāṇa copper was imitated by Mihiragula, probably during his reign in Kashmīr.

Although the Huns were mainly instrumental in introducing Sassanian types into India, it seems certain that shortly after their invasion a Sassanian dynasty, or a dynasty acknowledging the suzerainty of Persia, was established in Western India; for coins with bilingual inscriptions in Pahlavī and Nāgarī have been found, directly imitated from Sassanian issues. One of these bears the name Shāhī Tigin, and the Nāgarī legend reads, “_King of India and Persia_.” Another class with the name Vāsudeva is directly copied from a type of the coinage of the Sassanian Khusrū Parvīz struck in 627; but the best known and the most finely executed are the flat copper and silver pieces (Pl. VI, 5) which bear the name _Napkī Malik_; but whether this prince was a Persian or a Hun is doubtful.

These Sassanian coins were the prototypes of degenerate base silver pieces which are found in large quantities throughout Rājputāna, and must have served as currency for the early Rājpūt states there for centuries. At first they preserve the thin flat fabric of their models (Pl. VI, 6), but as the head on the obverse and the fire-altar on the reverse become more debased they grow thicker and more dumpy. The curious coins known as _Gadhiya Paisa_ (Pl. VI, 8), which circulated in the same districts and also in Gujarāt, probably down to a later period, also show traces of a Sassanian origin. The silver coins with the legend _Śrīmad Ādivarāha_ on the reverse, and Vishṇu in his boar avatar (Varāha) as the type of the obverse, retain traces of a fire-altar below the inscription. These have been attributed to the powerful Bhoja-deva of Kanauj (840-890), whose family, Gurjara in origin, had formerly ruled in south Rājputāna. Very similar in fabric are those inscribed _Śrī Vigraha_, assigned to Vigrahapāla I, circ. A.D. 910, of the Bengal Pāla dynasty.

All these debased coins follow the weight standard of their Sassanian originals, which represented the Attic drachma of 67·5 grains, and in inscriptions they are actually called “_drammas_.”