long ago put forward by Sir George Hill that 'the incisions were made in India, in order to put the coins out of circulation'.1 But an interesting fact may be added. Except in one stūpa-deposit, which as a votive offering may be regarded as a law unto itself, none of this Roman gold, whether mutilated or not, is found within the probable limits of the late 1st- and 2nd-century Kūshāṇa empire, which included the whole of north-western India and the west-coast trading-ports of the Indus delta, Gujarat and Bombay. Within that empire was at this time struck the only native gold coinage of the period in India, and it was struck significantly to the Roman standard. In other words, it was in unconcealed competition with the Roman coinage, and the suggestion has even been made that it consisted, at any rate in part, of re-struck Roman aurei. The implication is that all Roman gold which could be recovered was absorbed by the Kūshāṇa empire and thus regulated or reminted; and the all-powerful Kushāns saw to it that such Roman gold as was admitted to their border states was removed by mutilation from possible rivalry as currency, and relegated to use as bullion or ornament. The fact that most of this Roman gold is of 1st-century date, whereas the Kūshāṇa empire reached its prime in the 2nd century is readily explained by Roman export restrictions from the latter part of the 1st century onwards and the consequence that little more than gold surviving in trade from the previous period was now in use. The fact that a minority of the Roman gold was not mutilated implies, on this showing, merely the unequal reach of Kūshāṇa interference or a measure of administrative laxity that requires no explanation in the East. In regard to imported silver, the question did not arise. As already remarked, no silver coinage comparable with the imported denarii existed in India in the 1st or 2nd century A.D.; even the Kushāns issued none, with a single exception of Kadphises II in the British Museum and four coins, also unique, probably of his predecessor Kujūla Kadphises from Taxila.2 Thus, unless very doubtfully in the Andhra kingdom, there was little risk of the intrusion of the denarius as currency since the country, including the Kūshāṇa empire, was as a whole economically unprepared for it. We may now turn to our fifth point, geographical distribution. Be it repeated that a large proportion of the Roman coins from India has been found in the peninsula, to the south of the Vindhyas and even to the south of the main Deccan plateau. Within this vast area, the district of Coimbatore and its borders, some 250 miles ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1Num Chron., 3rd Series, XVIII (1898), 320; modified, ib. XIX (1899), 82. 2 Marshall, Taxila (Cambridge, 1951), 1, 68. |