Tales that coins tell
By Manohar Malgonkar

THE dense jungles that surround my house in the hills along the Goa-Karnataka border are dotted with the ruins of small shaivite shrines. The mystery about these temples is that there are no traces of human habitations in their a vicinity. They must be more than 1000 years old because the statuary of these temples has been identified by experts as being of the Kadamba period. Indeed the few images I possess and which, too must have been in some temples are said to be of the seventh and eighth century A.D.

One of these ruined shrines, with its blackstone Nandi still intact, is only about a mile from my house, and there was a time, not so long ago, when I used to take people who came to stay with us and did not mind a somewhat strenuous walk to see this Nandi, sitting all by himself in a patch of forest bordering a ricefield with no human habitation — not even a farmer’s hut — within a mile.

Another of these shrines, also all by itself in the thick forest, has its principal icons still in place, as are the thick, laterite walls, now blackened with age and with ferns sprouting out of their cracks, but no roof. In one of the tiny niches which must have once held oil lamps, there used to be a coin, thick and crudely shaped and covered with the dirt of centuries. As children we believed that, if you held that coin in the palm of your hand and closed your eyes and made a wish, that wish would come to pass.

In the early seventies, Grittli Mitterwalner, who is a professor of Oriental Archaeology at the University of Munich, paid a brief visit to my house to take a look at the few images I possess. She had only a couple of hours to spare since she was expected that evening at Dharwad where she was scheduled to give some talks at the University, so when she told me she was keen to see one of these jungle shrines, I took her to the one that was more easily accessible, the one with the icons still in place and with the walls still standing. She was particularly interested in taking a look at the coin I had spoken about.

That particular shrine, called the Ramlinga temple, I had not visited for at least 20 years, but it was still there, very much as I ever remembered it, down to those small niches in the side walls, except that the coin which one of them had held was not there. Someone must have taken it away, possibly as a good-luck charm.It was possibly some outsider, because the people who live in this area which is mainly a farming community, are highly superstitious, and would never take away what had once been brought to a temple, as a gift to its gods.

I got the impression that Mitterwalner wanted to visit that temple mainly to be able to examine that coin, because it was just possible that it might have been of help to her in determining the period during which the shrine was a place of regular worship. Over the intervening years, I had myself become interested in history and discovered that coins often proved of value in bracketing the dates of historical events. Sure, not all coins bear the precise date of their minting, but they invariably show the name, or the insignia, or the motto, of the personage who ordered their minting. Of course, by themselves they cannot tell the full story. At the same time, their findings, combined with other bits and pieces of reliable evidence, are of immense help to both historians and archaeologists.

An excellent example of the role played by coins in assisting historians is offered in Hendrik Van Loon’s invaluable reference book, The Arts of Mankind. Van Loon describes how, the ancient race known as the Phoenicians who actually originated in Syria, were such good traders that, nearly 2000 years ago, they had set up what might be called their trading posts as far away from their homeland as the coast of southern France called The Provence, but that they had also "visited North Africa and reached the mouth of the Senegal river."

All because of their coins found in these areas.

But here is an example from much nearer our times and in our homeland itself. Reverend H. Heras, as his honorific reveals, was a cleric by profession, but he was an eminent historian too, who taught the subject at St Xavier’s college in Mumbai. In addition, it seems that he was also an archaeologist who personally conducted excavations in Goa, in the twenties and thirties of this century when Goa was a Portuguese colony.

In the year, 1929, Father Heras was digging up an old shaivite shrine in the village of Chandor. In the garbhagriha, or the inner hall of this temple, he discovered a coin which had been minted by Muhammad bin Tughlaq.

Muhammad Tughlaq became the Sultan of Delhi in 1325. So that coin, struck after that date, must have been dropped in this temple in Goa a few years later. Other historical evidence, notably the first-hand account by that famous traveller in the mould of Marco Polo or Aieur Tsang, Ibn Batuta, tell us how, in the year 1343 or 1344, Muhammad Tughlaq had sent an armade of 52 ships to capture Goa and that the commander of this expedition was Ibn Batuta himself. Batuta also tells us that his troops had attacked a place called Chandrapur (today’s Chandor) in Goa and had destroyed its heathen shrines. So it was not as though the coin found by Father Heras makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the event. But what it does do is to corroborate Batuta’s reporting of the events as historically true.

From Goa to the island of Cicily which, in ancient times, was occupied by a colony of Greek settlers who must have been some of the richest men of their times. So when, around the fifth century B.C. it began to look as though the Romans were about to invade Cicily, the Greek settlers managed to bury all their household treasures in deep underground caves so that the plundering Roman soldiers would not be able to find them.

In this they were only too successful. The Romans invaded, slaughtered the islanders and destroyed their houses and places of worship, took away their women to be made slaves or concubines, but they never found their buried goods. Incredibly they remained buried for the next 1900 years.

It was only after World War II, and in the sixties of the present century when bits and pieces of ancient Greek artefacts began to be sold to avid collectors and to some of the world’s greatest museums that the Italian authorities began to suspect where these articles had come from. They organised their own excavations in the vicinity of the volcano, Mt Etna, and invited American experts to help them to find out these treasures.

It turned out that there were organised local gangs who had been digging for these treasures for years and selling special pieces for high prices through middle-men in Switzerland. In fact the people in this trade seemed to operate almost openly, and were locally known as the tombaroli, or grave-robbers.

Some of the world’s most prestigious museums are said to have bought some of these treasures giving rise to accusations of malpractices and even court cases. But how dropped coins are able to support some of these accusations was brought out by two coins discovered by Malcom Bell, III, an American archaeologist who is a director in charge of these excavations.

In one particularly deep and inacessible cave, Bell found a coin that had been "minted in Cicily between the years 216 and 212 B.C." and that find enabled Mr Bell to determine that, whatever had been stashed away in that place had to have been older than the minting of that coin.

But Bell never found out what it was that had been buried there, so deep underground. To be sure Bell was disappointed, but he was not really surprised. On the contrary, he would have been quite astonished if he had been able to discover some worthwhile object still left behind in that hole. Because earlier, almost at the entrance of the excavation, he had come upon another coin, and this other coin had been minted in Italy in the year 1978.

Sometime after that date, the tombarali had visited that cave and cleaned it up of whatever had been secretly buried there.