Signals in Script: Finding Meaning in Multilingual Issues of the Kushans and Western Kshatrapas

Coinage of the ancient Indian subcontinent was a multilingual affair. By the first century B.C.E., minting traditions not only issued coins with legends written in Greek and a variety of Middle Indo-Aryan dialects (i.e., Prakrits), but also made use of both local and imported scripts. While this numismatic multilingualism has been acknowledged in passing, its broader significance has yet to be explored in earnest. The use of non-Indic scripts in particular has been dismissed as either a poorly-executed adherence to Hellenistic precedents or superficial borrowing from other external sources, such as Roman imperial coinage. 

This paper takes a more nuanced approach to this multilingual phenomenon by addressing two cases from the early centuries of the Common Era: 1) the gold dinara of the Kushan Empire spanning Central Asia and northern India; and 2) the silver “drachms” of the Western Kshatrapas based in modern Gujarat. In evaluating these issues, it argues that the various languages and (pseudo-)scripts found on these coins represent deliberate deployments by their makers rather than passive copying—in essence, they mark the construction of coherent semantic systems, which are “legible” from a number of perspectives. 

For one, the multiple languages on coinage participated in wider linguistic expressions of power. In the case of the Kushan dinara, the presence of Bactrian legends in Greek script should be read in light of the Rabatak inscription of Kanishka I, which dictates a move to Bactrian, an “Aryan” language, from the Greek used for previous inscriptions and coins. The emergence of Sanskrit on Kshatrapa reverses as opposed to Prakrit similarly corresponds to an epigraphic shift further south—namely, the first Sanskrit royal inscription written in the name of Rudradaman I. Greek, but also Roman letterforms on the obverse of silver issues of Rudradaman reflect further linguistic experimentation, which culminates in a standardized “Greco-Roman” pseudo-script found on subsequent Kshatrapa issues. Both cases speak to multifaceted, multilingual strategies, communicating the worldliness of these exceptional monarchs, as well as their commitments to tradition. 

The study of this phenomenon has a number of ramifications for the field of numismatics. The orientation of Bactrian and Greco-Roman legends around royal portraits, together with their images, reflect nuanced dialogues with contemporary Roman currency imported to the subcontinent through Indian Ocean trade. Both coinages are products of Hellenistic die-carving techniques (e.g., guiding dots), but later examples also reveal shifts to other methods. Finally, while disparate renderings of these legends may indicate die-carvers who were unversed in foreign letters, this does not translate into unorganized production. In fact, in the case of Kshatrapa drachms, the pseudo-script obverse legends provide further evidence for mint structures proposed in scholarship. 

When we address elements of ancient Indian coinage that have been dismissed as “superficial” or even nonsensical, we find that they actually signal very profound uses of linguistic features in the creation of new visual languages—languages that communicated something to local denizens, but also an increasingly interconnected ancient world.