The Coins of the Pāratarājas

It seems fitting that, at a seminar organized to celebrate the 100 th anniversary of the Numismatic Society of India, I present a paper that offers a solution to a problem even older than the Society. In 1905, E. J. Rapson had published a small group of five coins which he identified as „Coins with reverse type “Svastika.”‟ 2 The coins were unified by the presence on their reverses of a central swastika surrounded by a circular legend. However, they differed in other respects. The first two coins, which were of silver, featured a bust right on the obverse and a reverse legend in Brāhmi letters. The third and fourth coins, also of silver, had a bust left on the obverse and the circular legends were in Kharoshthi characters. Finally, the fifth coin, which was made of copper, showed a standing figure facing right and a reverse legend also of Kharoshthi characters. The problems posed by these coins were: Who issued these coins? Did they belong in one series? In what order were they issued? When and where were they issued? Rapson noted that a coin similar to the first two, owned by Mr. Rawlins, had been published by Vincent Smith in JASB 1897 and that Smith had assigned the coin (on which he “doubtfully” read the name Arjuna) to the Saurashtran series, presumably meaning the dynasty we now call the Western Kshatrapas. However, Rapson rejected this attribution, on the grounds that the resemblance between the two series was not sufficient and that the provenance of the swastika coins, Jhelum in the Punjab, suggested that the coins were issued in that general area rather than in Saurashtra. However, Rapson himself was unable to make any definitive attribution, arguing only that the dynasty was probably one of Persian or Parthian princes or satraps ruling somewhere in northern Punjab. The Persian connection arose from the partial reading of the legends on the third and fourth coins which indicated that they were issued by a king whose father‟s name was Bagapharna, a name clearly Iranian in origin. Some progress on understanding these coins was made in the interim, but it is only now, over 100 years later, that we can finally answer all of the questions posed by Rapson‟s paper. Mukherjee had worked out in his 1972 monograph 3 that the coins were issues of a tribe called the Pāratas or Pāradas, as the phrase Parataraja was clearly visible on one of Rapson‟s coins. Senior collected more coins of the series and made some progress in identifying different types and proposing readings of the legends. But it was only within the last five years that true solutions to the problems were found. In a 2006 paper, I proposed readings for all of the known coins carrying Brāhmī legends, identifying five issuing kings and suggesting a relative and absolute chronology for them. 4 In a 2007 paper, Harry Falk finally read correctly for the first time most of the