Silk Road Numismatics

Silk Road Numismatics is a special field within Silk Road studies and within numismatics. It is particularly important because it covers a part of the world where history is not always clear – either because the historical record is incomplete or is contested. For example numismatics has played a central role in determining the chronology of the Kushan kings.

Silk Road Coins

Silk Road numismatics includes all coinage traditions from the East Asia to Europe, from earliest times. There is a great deal of merging of coinage traditions at locations on the Silk Road, and expertise in several coinage traditions is required to understand these. A notable example is the Sino-Kharoshthi coinage of Khotan, in which two coinage traditions come together - these coins are bilingual, with a Kharoshthi inscription on one side and a Chinese inscription on the other. They relate to both the Attic standard of ancient Greek coinage and to the wuzhu system of the Han dynasty, and name the local kings of Khotan, for whom there is no indigenous historical record.[1]

Training As with all branches of numismatics, most training is object-based, and therefore tends to take place where there are specialist collections. The Hirayama Trainee Curatorship in Silk Road Numismatics was established in the early 1990s, as "a five-year project to enable young scholars at the beginning of their careers, to come to the British Museum for a full academic year to develop their knowledge of Silk Road coins."[2] The five scholars were Chandrika Jayasinghe (Dept of Archaeology, Colombo, Sri Lanka), Naushaba Anjum (The Lahore Museum, Pakistan), Sergei Kovalenko (The Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia), Shah Nazar Khan (Peshawar University Museum, Pakistan), Wang Dan (China Numismatic Society, China). Other scholars have received grants from the Neil Kreitman Central Asian Numismatic Endowment, administered by the Royal Numismatic Society.

Silk Road Money It should be noted that coins were not the only form of money on the Silk Road, as recent studies on textiles have shown.[3]

Exhibitions and displays

Long-term

Short-term

Exhibition catalogues

Further reading


Specialist journals

Articles on Silk Road Numismatics appear in a number of scholarly journals, including:

References

  1. ↑ Joe Cribb, "The Sino-Kharoshthi coins of Khotan", Numismatic Chronicle, 1984, pp. 128–152; 1985 pp. 139– 149, plates 20–23. (translated as "Hetian Han-Querti Qian" (Khotanese Chinese-Kharoshthi Coins), in Zhongguo Qianbi (Chinese Numismatics, Journal of the Chinese Numismatic Society), Beijing, 1987 part 2, pp. 31–40 and plate)
  2. ↑ Joe Cribb and Helen Wang, Professor Ikuo Hirayama and the British Museum, in Silk Road Coins and Culture (Kamakura: Institute of Silk Road Studes, 1997)p. 3.
  3. ↑ See Valerie Hansen and Helen Wang, "Textiles as Money on the Silk Road", Special issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, June 2013.
  4. ↑ https://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/RP_Exhibitions_Chronology.pdf p. 80.
  5. ↑ https://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/RP_Exhibitions_Chronology.pdf p. 102.
  6. ↑ http://www.silk-road.com/newsletter/vol3num2/4_ying.php
  7. ↑ http://www.worldcat.org/title/silk-road-art-and-archaeology-journal-of-the-institute-of-silk-road-studies-kamakura/oclc/23857017
  8. ↑ http://www.bulletinasiainstitute.org/
  9. ↑ http://numismatics.org.uk/society-publications/the-numismatic-chronicle/
  10. ↑ revue numi
  11. ↑ http://www.persee.fr/collection/numi
  12. ↑ https://sites.google.com/site/societedenumismatiqueasiatique/revue
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