Conveners
S29. ANTIQUITY AND MIDDLE AGES 3. ASIA
- Gunnar Dumke (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)
The ancient city of Barikot/Bazira is located in the Swat Valley (Uddiyana) in present-day northern Pakistan. The excavations of the Italian Archaeological Mission over 23 seasons (1984–2021) have yielded 469 coin finds, catalogued and analysed within the framework of a project supported by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. These finds cover a time-span from the 3rd century BCE to the 10th...
After the collapse of the Mauryan empire, political control in the Indian subcontinent fragmented, with new regional polities coming to the fore, several of which issued coinage for local circulation. In the Punjab, from 2nd century BCE-1st century CE, several janapadas (tribal clans) issued coins, but only one city state: Pratishthana. Located in the eastern Punjab, the ancient site of...
The paper studies the metrology of Gupta gold coins using XRF analysis. Kumar (Treasures of the Gupta Empire) had studied the gold content of 179 Gupta gold coins using this methodology. However, his attributions have been challenged and seem unsupportable. This paper looks at Kumar's data using the corrected attributions and then extends the dataset by performing XRF testing on a new batch of...
This paper focuses on the gold coins and bracteates excavated from the Shoroon Bumbagar tomb, Mongolia. Among these objects, we identify 16 imitations of Byzantine solidi, 7 imitations of Sasanian drachms and 8 gold bracteates with distinctly Central Asian features which attest rich cultural exchanges in Eurasian late antiquity. Past research (Thierry and Morrison, 1994; Raspopova, 1999;...
