ratio one to the other-either exactly equal, or exact multiples and parts of each other-we may fairly presume, either that the one has borrowed from the other, or that each has borrowed from some common source. Where the ratio is inaccurate or simply approximative, it is to be treated as accidental and undesigned."—George Grote, Minor Works, p. 138, Review of Boeckh's "Metrologische," etc. (Berlin, 1838).

It will be discovered in the following pages how far these conditions are fulfilled by the records of Indian monetary progress, traditional or material. Had M. Queipo confined the claims of the West to having influenced the literature and learning of the East at a later period, I should have been too ready to support him, as it can be proved to demonstration that the Brahmanical writers in after-times borrowed Greek science, and even appropriated the tenets of our Greek Testament, not only without acknowledgment, but with studious disguise and pretended Indian authority.1 The origination of the Indian system of weights, in India, however, seems to admit of no question, the fundamental principles of which were probably framed in situ before the Vedic Aryans moved from the banks of the Oxus, and long before the Western branch of the Aryan family took their first lesson in Hellenic idolatry. That the Indian system should disclose fragmentary points of relationship to the Egyptian, and more decided associations with the less remote Accad civilization of the Euphrates valley, was only to be expected,—the three nationalities were all members of the great Túránian family who once seem jointly to have occupied the southern limits of the supposedly habitable earth. But the intrusion of new nationalities on the Tigris severed whatever of ethnic continuity may have previously existed, and left India to work out her own future, undisturbed by ties of race or foreign intervention, so that very many centuries afterwards, when the Greeks penetrated into the land, they felt and acknowledged a purely independent national development,

1 See infrà, p. 27.

2 Scythism and Hellenism.-" The parents of all the heresies ... are these four primary ones:

"The first is Barbarism (Bapßapiouds, Patriarchism ?), which prevailed without a rival from the days of Adam through ten generations to the time of Noah....

"The second is Scythism (kvetoμds), which prevailed from the days of Noah, and thence downwards to the building of the Tower and Babylon. . . .

"The third is Hellenism ('EXλeviouds Ionism), which originated in the days of Seruch with the introduction of idolatry: and as man had hitherto followed each some demonolatrous superstition of his own, they were now reduced to a more established form of polity and to the rites and ceremonies of idols, and the followers of this began with the use of painting, making likenesses of those whom they had formerly honoured, either kings or chiefs. . . . The Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Phrygians, and Phoenicians were the first propagators of this superstition of making images and of the mysteries; from whom it was transferred to the Greeks from the time of Cecrops downwards. But it was not till afterwards, and at a considerable interval, that Cronos and Rhea, Zeus and Apollo, and the rest, were esteemed and honoured as gods."-Epiphanius, quoted in Cory's "Ancient Fragments" (London, 1832), p. 53.

3 There are many curious traces of this ancient connexion, material and traditional. Strabo, xv. i. 25, quoting Nearchus, says, "When Alexander saw crocodiles in the Hydaspes, and

Egyptian beans (Nymphæa Nelumbo) in the Acesines, he thought he had discovered the sources of the Nile."

“In manner, language, and many other respects, Egypt was certainly more Asiatic than African; and though there is no appearance of the Hindú and Egyptian religions having been borrowed from one another, . . yet it is not improbable that those two nations may have proceeded from the same stock, and have migrated southwards from their parent country in Central Asia."-G. Wilkinson, "Ancient Egyptians," i. 3. See also his articles in Rawlinson's Herodotus, ii. 29, note 9, and Appendix, p. 279.

See also Herodotus, iv. 44, vii. 69, 70; Strabo, i. ii. 25, 26, xv. i. § 4, 13, 19, 25; Arrian, Indica, vi. "The Northern Indians bear a greater resemblance in form and feature to the Egyptians;" vii. "The Indians were anciently like the Scythians, a wandering race of mortals who tilled no lands ;" G. Syncellus, 151, e. Αἰθίοπες ἀπὸ Ἰνδοῦ ποταμοῦ ἀναστάντες πρὸς τῇ Αἰγύπτῳ ᾤκησαν, “ The Ethiopians came from the Indus and settled in Egypt;" Eusebius, Chron. Can. ii. 278; Pliny, vi. 22, 26; Justin, ii. 1; Am. Marc. xxii. 15; Caldwell, Dravidian Grammar, 66, note. See also the ethnological Scythic connexion treated at p. 23, "The Brahui, the language of the Beluchi mountaineers in the Khánship of Kelat, enables us to trace the Dravidian race beyond the Indus to the southern confines of Central Asia;" and pp. 38, 42-3-5, 69, 71, etc.; and for the Australian continental question, p. 52; Prinsep's Essays, vol. ii. p. 50.

altogether removed from the characteristics of the other Oriental nations with whom they had come in contact.1

As regards the near approximation of a single Indian weight to the kat or unit of the Egyptians, this point will form the subject of further illustration. In the meanwhile, we may freely recognize the possibility of an accepted commercial weight, in these primitive days of traffic and barter, passing mechanically from nation to nation; and though divided by distance and other obstructions, there were many intermediary carriers who may have transported the given weight or its near counterparts from Egypt to India. Whether this result was due to the wholesale deportation of races so prevalent in Euphrates politics, or brought about by the ordinary commercial intercourse on the lines of the Oxus and the Hindú Kush, or more directly through the deserts of Southern Persia and the coast of Mekrán, we need not stop to inquire.

Having so far outlined the case of the competing claims of two dissevered nationalities to priority in the adoption of an unimportant item in the Metric Scale, we come to the much more pertinent inquiry involved in the closer and more abiding relations established between the old and the new lords of India's soil, and have to endeavour to distinguish the traces of the later contributions and innovations of the northern Aryans from the home developments of the aborigines, or the secondary advances of the earlier occupying races. The Vedic Aryans, as will be seen hereafter, during their passage in tribal sections through the gorges and valleys of the Hindú Kush, carried down with them a type of Phoenician writing, in a very advanced stage of adaptation towards the higher aims and more exact expression of the Sanskrit language; and with these assimilated characters, as shown by their subsequent co-ordination, a method of numeration distinctly based upon Phoenico-Egyptian ideals: while the indigenous Indians of a closely subsequent epoch are found to employ an independent scheme of figures, in appropriate unison with the outlines of their own local alphabet. These and other international questions will have to be examined more at large in future pages; but thus much of preliminary notice is necessary, as it may be very difficult to discriminate and separate these conflicting influences as they present themselves in the ordinary course of the investigation.

1

'Moreover, India being of the largest extent of all others, by far, is inhabited by many different nations (of whom none are foreigners, but all natural inhabitants): and they say that no strangers ever planted amongst them, nor they themselves ever sent forth any colonies into other countries; and they tell stories that anciently the inhabitants fed only upon herbs and roots that grow in the fields, and clothed themselves with wild beasts' skins, as the Grecians did; and that arts and other things conducing to the well-being of man's life were found out by degrees, necessity pressing upon a creature that was rational and ingenious, and had likewise the further helps and advantages of hands, speech, and quickness of invention to find out ways to relieve himself."-(Magasthenes) Diodorus Siculus, ii. 38. Translation of G. Booth (1814), i. p. 132. So also Strabo, quoting Megasthenes, who "advises persons not to credit the ancient histories of India, for, except the expeditions of Hercules, of Bacchus (F), and the later invasion of Alexander, no

army was ever sent out of their country by the Indians, nor did any foreign enemy ever invade or conquer it. . . . But not one of these persons proceeded as far as India, and Semiramis died before her intended enterprise was undertaken." Strabo, xv. c. i. § 6, Falconer's translation. See also Arrian, Indica, x. et seq.; Pliny, vi. 21; Mas'audi, Meadows of Gold, Paris edit., i. 148.

2 Rawlinson's Ancient Monarchies, ii. 529, "Under the Assyrian Kings, Chaldeans were transported into Armenia, Jews and Israelites into Assyria and Media, Arabians, Babylonians, Susianians, and Persians into Palestine. The most distant portions of the empire changed inhabitants; and no sooner did a people become troublesome from its patriotism and love of independence, than it was weakened by dispersion, and its spirit subdued by the severance of all its local associations." See also p. 430.

The general subject under review seems to divide itself into four groups.

I. Weights and their corresponding Measures.

II. Money, under its historical aspect.

III. Coins, proper, as distinguished from Bullion.

IV. Weights of the normal Indian Coins tested by their coincidence with the later

Mediæval Mint issues of the land.

This division into chapters will necessarily entail a certain amount of repetition in the text, and frequent cross references to the illustrative notes; but, though inconvenient in some respects, it is the only methodic way of placing the whole question fully and clearly before the reader.

CHAPTER I.1

WEIGHTS AND THEIR CORRESPONDING MEASURES.

THE system of Indian weights, in its local development, though necessarily asserting a minor claim to the consideration of the European world, may well maintain a leading position in the general investigation of national metrologies, on the ground of its rudimentary and independent organization, and the very ancient date at which its definitions were embodied and committed to writing; while to numismatists it offers the exceptional interest of being able to exhibit extant equivalents of the specified weights preserved in the authoritative text of the original code of Hindu law, as professedly expounded by Manu, and incorporated in the Mánava Dharma Sástra. The positive epoch of this work is undetermined; but it confessedly represents, in its precepts, a state of society considerably anterior to the ultimate date of their collection and final redaction;3 while the body of the compilation is assigned, on speculative grounds, to something more than 400 B.C.

2

It is a singular and highly suggestive fact that numismatic testimony should have already taught us to look for the site of the chief seat of ancient civilization in Northern India, to the west

1 The heads and partial framework of this article, amounting to about one-quarter of the matter now printed, were originally published in the Numismatic Chronicle for 1864. The Asiatic Society of Bengal did me the unaccustomed honour to reprint the article in their Journal for 1864-5.

2 Treatises on Law long anterior "to Manu are still in existence.”—Prof. Aufrecht, Philological Society's Transactions, 1873, p. 222.

3 I trust it will not be imagined that I desire to ignore Megasthenes's statement, that the Indians had "no written laws" (Strabo, xv. c. i. § 53). This is, indeed, precisely the testimony-seeing the source from whence it was derived-we should expect from what we now know of Brahmanical policy (note 3, p. 8). As to the addition, "who are ignorant even of writing," this vague assertion had previously been nullified by the more accurate information of Nearchus (Strabo, xv. c. i. § 67), and is further conclusively repudiated by the incidental evidence contained in the remarkable passage in the same work, where it is stated, "At the beginning of the new year all the philosophers repair to the king at the gate, and anything useful which they have committed to writing, or observed, tending to improve the productions of the earth, is then publicly declared" (xv. c. i. § 39). Professor Max Müller, in his work on "Sanskrit Literature" (London, 1859), has devoted several pages to the examination of the use of writing in India, in olden time. I concur in his conclusions as to its limited employment among the Vedic Aryans, though I explain this firstly by the imperfect development and unsettled life they led, and secondly by the defective nature of the Bactrian alphabet they apparently relied on; but more especially to the later priestly tendency to discourage un

authorized readers. But I demur distinctly to any such limitation being applied to the nations of India at large. Buddhism, in its overt acts, implies education among the masses, if in nothing else, in the prominence accorded to doctrinal public inscriptions and practical writing on mile-stones.

4 Max Müller says-"The Code of Manu is almost the only work in Sanskrit literature which has as yet not been assailed by those who doubt the antiquity of everything Indian"; though he reduces the date to about 400 B.C., and points out that the Laws of Manu are paraphrases of the Dharma Sútras of the Mánavas.-Sanskrit Literature, pp. 61, 62, 206; and Morley's Digest, p. cxcvii.

Prof. H. H. Wilson, though hesitating to admit the high antiquity of the entire bulk of the composition, was fully prepared to assign many passages to a date "at least" as early as 800 B.C.-Prinsep's Essays, i. note, p. 222. See also Professor Wilson's translation of the Rig Veda Sanhitá, i. p. xlvii.

M. Vivien de St.-Martin places Manu under "la période des temps héroïques," i.e. between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries B.C. and the Buddhist epoch of B.C. 543.-Etude sur la Géographie et les Populations primitives de l'Inde, Paris, 1859. The same writer, in a later paper in the Révue Germanique of 1861, p. 80, fixes the first appearance of the Aryans in India at 1600 B.C., the collection of the Vedic writings at 1200 B.C., and Buddha's Nirvána at 543 B.C.

Prof. Cowell, in his edition of Elphinstone's India (edit. 1866, p. 249), reduces the date of Manu to the third century B.C., but adds that "it was undoubtedly composed from older documents," and "may therefore be considered as the last redaction of the traditional laws of the Mánavas."

ward of the Upper Jumna-a tract, for ages past, relatively impoverished. For such a deduction we have indirect, but not the less valuable historical authority, derived in parallel coincidence from the comparative geography of the Vedic period, and from the verbatim text of Manu, the integrity of which seems in these matters to have been sufficiently preserved.

The most prolific field among the favoured resorts of our native coin collectors, in 1837, chanced to be the exact section of the country constituting the Brahmávarta of the Hindu lawgiver; and Thaneswar (lat. 29° 58', long. 76° 54′)—since so celebrated in the annals of the land as the battle-field of successive contending hosts-contributed, at its local fairs, many of the choicest specimens of the inceptive currencies. In this region the Aryans appear to have almost lost their separate identity, and to have commenced the transitional process of merging their ethnic individuality amid the resident population, though still asserting religious and incidentally political supremacy. Such a state of things seems vividly shadowed forth in the ethnological definitions preserved in Manu; and it may possibly prove to be more than a mere coincidence, that the geographical distribution of the limits of “ Brahmarshi, as distinguished from Brahmávarta,” in the same passage, should so nearly be identical with the general boundaries I have elsewhere traced,1 from independent sources, for the spread of the Bactrian alphabet in its Eastern course.

As I have claimed for the Pre-Aryan Indians the independent creation of an alphabet specially contrived for, and adapted to, their own lingual requirements, similarly it can be shown,

1 Infra, p. 47.

2 Prinsep's Essays, London, 1858, ii. 43; Num. Chron. 1863, p. 226. Later investigations enabled me to take a more comprehensive view of the derivation of Aryan alphabets, of which I subjoin a summary. "At a Meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society, on the 9th April, 1866, The Right Hon. Viscount Strangford in the chair,-Mr. Thomas, adverting to recent controversies respecting the parentage of the various modes of writing in use in Ancient India, spoke On the Adapted Alphabets of the Aryan Races.' These were the results of his palæographical investigations: The Aryans invented no alphabet of their own for their special form of human speech, but were, in all their migrations, indebted to the nationality amid whom they settled for their instruction in the science of writing: (1) The Persian Cuneiform owed its origin to the Assyrian, and the Assyrian Cuneiform emanated from an antecedent Turanian symbolic character; (2) the Greek and Latin alphabets were manifestly derived from the Phoenician; (3) the Bactrian was adapted to its more precise functions by a reconstruction and amplification of Phoenician models; (4) the Devanagari was appropriated to the expression of the Sanskrit language from the pre-existing Indian Páli or Lát alphabet, which was obviously originated to meet the requirements of Turanian (Dravidian) dialects; (5) the Pehlvi was the offspring of later and already modified Phoenician letters; and (6) the Zend was elaborated out of the limited elements of the Pehlví writing, but by a totally different method to that followed in the adaptation of the Semitic Bactrian. Mr. Thomas then proceeded to advert to the single point open to discussion involved under the fourth head, tracing the progress of the successive waves of Aryan immigration from the Oxus into the provinces of Ariania and the Hindú Kush, and the downward course of the pastoral races from their first entry

into the Panjab and the associate crude chants of the Vedic hymns to the establishment of the cultivated Brahmanic institutions on the banks of the Sarasvati, and the elaboration of Sanskrit grammar at Taxila, connecting the advance of their literature with the simplified but extended alphabet they constructed in the Arianian provinces out of a very archaic type of Phoenician, and whose graphic efficiency was so singularly aided by the free use of birch bark. This alphabet continued in use as the official writing under the Greek and Indo-Scythian rulers of Northern India, until it was superseded by the superior fitness and capabilities of the local Páli, which is proved by Așoka's scattered inscriptions on rocks and monoliths (Láts) to have constituted the current writing of the continent of India in B.C. 250, while a similar, if not identical, character is seen to have furnished the prototype of all the varying systems of writing employed by the different nationalities of India at large, from Sind to Ceylon, and spreading over Burmah, till the Indian Páli meets Chinese alphabets on their own soil in Annam. In conclusion, Mr. Thomas pointed out the importance of the discoveries of Norris and Caldwell, derived from completely independent sources, regarding the Scythic origin of the introductory Indian alphabets."-Athenæum, April 14, 1866.

No substantive article was ever prepared or published in further development of the somewhat comprehensive theory thus enunciated; but its purport has been quoted, with seeming approval, and, as far as I am aware, without hostile comment, in France and Germany. The subject has likewise been discussed at two several meetings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, and Report of Meeting, 6th Feb. 1867, p. 33. See also J.R.A.S. vol. v. (N.s.) p. 421). With the general tenor of these quasi-conversational proceedings I have no possible cause of dissatisfaction. Naturally, the living representatives of the Indian