For a fruitful outcome, numismatic research on Gupta gold coins has always
depended heavily on access to sufficient coins and their metadata, either first hand or
via catalogues. Luckily, heritage institutes such as the British Museum, and numismatic
societies, such as the American Numismatic Society in New York, now offer direct
digital access to their holdings. Hopefully, several Indian museums with important
collections of Gupta coins stowed away and shielded from access, will follow suit. In
the meantime, online auction houses have also unlocked routes to coin data (visual
and documentary) that would have otherwise been hard to bring together.
From the early days of Gupta coin collecting, now going back 200 years, private
collectors such as Vincent Tregear and J.H. Rivett-Carnac, opened up their treasure
boxes for research and publication, and thus propelled Gupta coin research along.
Vikramm Chand’s cabinet of Gupta gold coins at the British Museum exposed
established and aspiring students of Gupta coin arts to the rich palette of forms and
varieties that these coins have on offer.
Gupta coin studies are very much alive, and I can only mention a few of the
contributors. Pankaj Tandon has engaged with the attribution of heavier Archer coins,
of a King Chandra, (e.g., auction ## 1146-1148). More importantly, he brought out the
true identity of coins of Huna rulers ‘hiding’ among later Gupta coins (## 1165-1167).
Sanjeev Kumar’s ‘immersive exploration of the Gupta dynasty’ resulted in a beautifully
presented type catalogue referenced in the descriptions of the coins in auction.
Both Kumar and Tandon have used the availability of X-ray fluorescence technique
(which can bring out the elemental composition of a coin) to publish a wealth of
data on the metal content of Gupta gold coins. These data allow for a much more
accurate assessment of the gradual changes in fabric, and thus help develop our ideas
on the chronology of their production. That their first manufacture was modelled
after the coins of the Kushanas and Later Kushanas (e.g., auction ## 1050-1068) was
evident from the earliest academic studies in the 1830s onwards. In 2023, Joe Cribb
systematically addressed the ‘progression of changes’, either intentional or incidental,
that would transform the coins into a recognizably ‘Gupta’ corpus.
My own dealings with the legacy in gold left by the Guptas resulted in a thesis and
research papers that aimed to explore and expose the patterns of similarity and
change behind the overwhelming diversity in engraving styles, iconographies and
fabric features. This research has culminated in a series of books entitled Dealing with
Diversity in Gupta Gold Coins, that is presently under production. References added to
the descriptions in the present auction pertain to the group classification elaborated in
the series. The patterns discerned can only be brought out by a sufficiently large and
diverse corpus of coins, such as that of Vikramm Chand. To bring out these patterns,
distinctions between ‘special’ and ‘common’ coins are hardly relevant, as it is only in
unison that these coins reveal the weave of Gupta coin making.
Ellen M. Raven
(Leiden University)
FOREWORD
by Ellen Raven