THE EARLIEST COINAGE OF INDIA Among primitive peoples trade was carried on by barter, that is, exchange in kind. Gradually, with the spread of civilising influences the inconvenience of promiscuous exchange made itself felt, and certain media were agreed upon and accepted by the community at large. Wealth in those early times being computed in cattle, it was only natural that the ox or cow should be employed for this purpose. In Europe, then, and also in India, the cow stood as the higher unit of barter. At the lower end of the scale, for smaller purchases, stood another unit which took various forms among different peoples—shells, beads, knives, and where those metals had been discovered, bars of copper or iron. In India the cowrie-shell, brought from the Maldive Islands, was so employed, and is still to be seen in many bazars in the shops of the smaller money-changers. The discovery of the precious metals carried the evolution of coinage a stage further: for the barter unit was substituted its value in metal, usually gold. The Greek _stater_ and the Persian _daric_ certainly, and possibly the Indian _Suvarṇa_, so frequently mentioned by Sanskrit authors, was the value of a full-grown cow in gold, calculated by weight. However this may be, in ancient India gold dust, washed out of the Indus and other rivers, served the purposes of the higher currency, and from 518 B.C. to about 350 B.C., when an Indian province or satrapy was included in the Achæmenid Empire of Persia, 360 talents in gold dust was, Herodotus tells us,[1] paid annually as tribute from the province into the treasury of the Great King. [1] Herod III, 94. Quoted in Cunningham, _Coins of Ancient India_, p. 12. Silver from natural sources was at that time less plentiful in India, but was attracted thither in large quantities in exchange for gold, which was cheaper there than elsewhere in the ancient world. The transition from metal weighed out to the required amount to pieces of metal of recognized weight and fineness regularized by the stamp of authority is not difficult of explanation. The great convenience of the latter would recommend them at once to the merchant, and to the ruler as the receiver of tribute and taxes. Both in Asia and Europe this transition can be illustrated from extant specimens; but, whereas in Europe and Western Asia, from the inscriptions which appeared early on the coins themselves and from outside evidence, we know the origin of the earliest coins and the names of the cities or districts which issued them, the origin of India’s earliest coinage, like so much of her early history, is still shrouded in mystery.