Coin

I was born in the fires of an ancient forge in the hilss of the Hindi Kush. Amid the clatter of hammers and the chatter of Hellenic, I pa apply on a battered incus for the final pangs of my creation. Beneath me lay a hardened die rush the image of my king atop me pressed a nonher, etched with horsemen and most mirror-image words. then the hammer struck, hard and heavy, ringing out the innovatives of my nativity. With each belo the dies cut into deeper into my flesh, stamping their images as father and mother of a freshly minted coin.As I insure back across two millennia for these earliest memories, I marbel at my extensive, nowadays legendary, journey from mine to mint to market to museum. I remeber Rome as a rising power, a deoxycytidine monophosphate ahead the first Caesars I recall the early days of Emperor Asokas moral conquests and the builing of Chinas Great Wall. I have outlived six of the seven wonders of the ancient world. (I am told the Great gain still stands) Yet I am no mute infract money talks. Mine is the voice of history, recorded by numismatists trained to instruct my ancient stories of art, industry, worship, and war.My eloquence youth, when legends traced my origins to a colony of giant ants. Most deluxe in ancient times was mined by condemned criminals and slaves whose lives meant little to their taskmasters. In my days, the mines of Egypt were legendary hives of human misery. But it was said that gold in great abundance could be found near India, where giant ants piled auriferous dust at the entrances of their tunnels. These antsnearly the size of dogs, the legend saiddefended their burrows ferociously against men who dared to steal the spoils of their digging.But lots(prenominal) danger was trivial given the ruler costs of ancient mining, and so the legend spread as farawayther as Greece. When horse parsley the Great invaded the Indus Valley in the fourth century BC, his Greek soldiers eagerly searched for this legend ary lode. Local guides displayed for them the dappled skins of the ants themselves, still the invaders could not find a single mound of precious gold just a few generations later, however, Greek settlers were gathering large quantities of gold in this very region.These descendants of Alexanders warriors created a wealthy kingdom called Bactria, knget for its beauteous money and gold coins like me. (See Aramco World, May/June 1994) Where, scholars have long wondered, did the Greek kings of Bactria find so much precious metal? International sell constitutes one obvious source, solely giant ants might be other. ii thousand years afterward I was born, explorers discovered that burrowing marmots on the removed(p) Dansar Plateau, near the borders of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China, do indeed heap mounds of gold-bearing earth at the mouths of their burrows.These stocky rodents, called mountain ants by the Persians who passed the legend on to the Greeks, grow to the size of small dogs and pitch up meter- high hills of auriferous subsoil. Even in modern font times, local tribes harvest this gold in an age-old tradition that recalls the legends of my youth. It is possible, after all, that inhuman marmots, rather than inhuman misery, brought my gold to the forges of man. From the second I left the royal mint of my king Eucratides, eager hands grasped for me. I was a beauty then, the envy of every monarch and merchant from the Indus to the Euphrates.Great artists had carved my kick upstairs dies in mirror-image, etching tiny Greek words and figures backward so that these negative forms would produce positive impressions on my two faces. The result, when smashed into 8. 5 grams (0. 3 oz) of gold, is a splendid coin called a stater a treasure of art as well as riches. My obserse (the tapers face produced by the lower, anvil die) boasts a once-brilliant portrait of King Eucratides, framed in a traffic circle of small dots. Behind the kings neck trail s the royal diadem, a ribbon tied(p) around his head as the unmistakble emblem of his office.His cloak, engraved in high relief, is that of a cavalry commander, and his great crested helmet resembles a Boeotian stick out lauded by the historian Xenophon as the best headgear for cavalrymen. Attached to my kings helmet is a frontlet that sweeps back and ends in bulls horns and ears. Some con placer this a symbolic evocation of Alexander the Greats war-horse Bucephalus (Ox-head), who had horns according to some accounts, and who had been buried by Alexander near my own birthplace. Like Alexander, my king rode with valor at the head of his elite cavalry and conquered with an aggressive Greek spirit.In fact, Eucratides called himself the Great long before that title was given to Alexander by the Romans. On my reverse (the chase side produced by the upper, punch die), you fire still read the uplifted caption King Eucratides the Great. No Greek had ever put such words on his coinag e before, but modesty was never my kings style. The build up horsemen who gallop within the inscription are Castor and Pollux. In Greek mythology, they were the sons of Zeus who would suddenly appear in a crisis to save the day, much like Eucratides himself, who wrestled the Bactrian throne from a faltering dynasty.These twins carry palms, fanfare spears, and wear matte up caps topped with stars. Behind the rear legs of the trailing horse, you can discern a Greek monogram, W. This mark identifies either the mint or the magistrate responsible for my creation. Nearly every gold and silver coin minted in Bactria carries such a birthmark, but the exact meaning of the many symbols has long been lost. For example, some scholars think that my monogram indicates the city of Balkh or Aornus others adjoin altogether the initials of some unknow Greek official who served a few months as accoucheuse in the delivery of my kings freshly money.If you look past the scars of my long life, I am as beautifully Greek as the Parthenon itself, though I was born 5000 kilometers (3000 mi) east of Athens. I am the mind of the West imprinted on the precious metal of the East. The implications haunt me. Am I propaganda etched on plunder, or the product of a peaceful integration? Do I personify apartheid or a partnership? The design and distribution of bills are deliberate, official acts, so money can never be neutral in the struggles of any society.Look at a nations coins and you will see the scatter-shot of its cultural canon even a thawing-pot like America has a partisan coinage, its message overwhelmingly white, male, European, and Christian. In ancient Bactria, I was no less biased. My milieu is entirely Mediterranean, and my intrinsic value kept me beyond reach of the marginalized poor of the non-Greek population. Gold circulated over the heads of these farmers and servants, who relied upon small denominations of bronze of silver for their meager purchases.My king minted for them some square, bilingual issues struck on an Indian weight standard, but I belonged to colonial Greek aristocrats, the ruling elite of Bactria. Unlike small bronze and silver coins which travel swiftly but never far, my gold brothers and I ranged into territories quite distant from our monarchs own marketplaces. throughout the Middle East, Hellenistic states were expeditious to accept gold coins struck on a common Greek standard with recognizable types. I, for example, would be recognize in any market from the Balkans to Bactria.I had no restrictive local features, as did my square bilingual cousins, and my denomination conformed to the Attic Greek system used nearly everywhere in Alexanders old empire. The range of my travels can be easily documented In Mesopotamia, for example, another Greek king so admired my design that he shamelessly stole every tip for his own coinage. But globe-trotting gold cannot be too careful, for everywhere, insatiable melting pots stand ready. My parent dies produced as many as 20,000 siblings identical to me now, of them all, only I have survived the gauntlet that gold runs.The most critical moment in any moneys life is the day it ceases to be currency. Once a coin can no longer circulate in a given place or time, human hands are quick to convert it into some more useful form. Most of my brothers became bullion again, their identities short lost in the issues of other, less ancient kings. Some may hold up still as a statues thumb or a goblets lip, but I would not recognize them. I carry the last known imprint of our shared dies because an unusual circumstance spared my life. Painful and defacing though it was, that agent added 2000 years to my story and gave me an unexpected career.A sturdy loop of my metal was fused to my reverse side, right across my galloping horsemen. The attachment was sized to fit a finger, and I became a sinet ring. This ancient operation changed the whole pattern of my life. My surfaces no longe r wore evenly instead my obverse suffered horribly as it rode that band clear to daily bumps and bruises, while my reverse design was now shielded from the whold. I lived a strange new life on the wrong side of the humand hand, banished from the palm where coins enjoy the camaraderie of active currency. Who had done this to me?The Greeks, as far as I could determine, were gone. Shortly after my kings reign, Bactria fell to successive waves of meandering(a) invaders. Some of them later settled in the region and created the Kushan empire, astride the famous Silk Roads that linked the empires of Rome and China. One Kushan ruler so exceeded my own kings ambitions that he proclaimed himself not only the Great, but also King of Kings, Son of Heaven, Caesar a title that is simultaneously Iranian, Indian, Chinese, and Roman. Although I in conclusion found myself outside the closed world of my Greek makers, I felt welcome among these eclectic Kushans.They borrowed freely from my past. O ne of their graves contained a majestic cameo imitating my design, and signet rings of Greek style were common elements in their elaborate gold-spangled costumes. eventually lost or interred I cannot recall which I reluctantly returned beneath the soil of Central Asia. For twenty centuries I slept you cannot imagine the hindrance of time. My gold kept its luster while all around me the grim poisons of earth ate away the baser metals. Above me, kings gave way to caliphs and khans as new realms dawned and died.Other gold shone for the civilizations of Muslims, Mongols, and Mughals while I lay undiscovered, underground, my fame forgotten. Neither man or marmot rescued me until modern times. Then, I suddenly awoke and saw myself reflected in the long dark eyes of a jubilant discoverer. My new guardian considered the useful of the melting pot, but my unusual appearance gave him pause. Not just another antique coin, I was a warriors signet, well-suited to his own station. He was an Afghan officer, and I found a new home on his hand. There I was schooled in the long history I had missed.I learned that Bactria had become Afghanistan, where the weapons were new but the wars unchanged. Great powers still converged upon this rugged and remote bastion in order to control the gateways between Europe, Asia and India. Now, however, this struggle was called the Great Game. Intrepid spies from tzarist Russia and imperial Britain crept along the snow-filled passes of Central Asia, and tired armies clashed in places called Kabul, Kandahar and the Khyber Pass. Rudyard Kipling and others romanticized the struggle, but daring men did not bleed the less for all this talk of games. I saw the fight firsthand