PAKISTAN - part 3

    We had reached the point, in our historico-numismatic survey of Pakistan, when a permanent Muslim beachhead had been established there and Islam was about to become, governmentally speaking, dominant.  The time is the 10th century CE or thereabouts.  There was basically one coin of note: the billon item we call the “jital.”
    In the last 10 years or so the term “jital” has come to be applied by many or most interested parties to the dominant, and in many times and places, the only coin in use from eastern Afghanistan to the environs of Delhi.  Generically it was a billon coin of varying low fineness and a weight range, sometimes fixed, other times variable, of about 2-3 grams.  The “classic” type had a bull on one side and a horseman on the other.  From this core type numerous offshoots were developed over the course of nearly 5 centuries.  Some of these coins were probably actually called “jitals” by their users, but others certainly were not.  “Dirham” was certainly a designation used by the Ghaznavids for example, and some, such as those of the early Delhi sultans, were probably named by their weight in “ganis.”  The fact, when you get down to it, is that for the most part we don’t know what they were called.
    Anyway, we had reached the point when the Turkish slave commanders of eastern Afghanistan began to assume the perquisits of independence, among which the striking of coin was an important function, it being a primary mode of propaganda of the day, for otherwise most people would have no reason to know who their master was.
    A system of land grants to the soldiery was in process of implementation in Afghanistan and Iran.  We call this system “feudalism.”  By this process former slaves were made into lords of various ranks.  In an attempt to monopolize the land for themselves and to obtain a labor force for their holdings the nature of the coinage was changed.
    The bull and horseman type silver coins of the Shahis of Kabul had their weight fixed in the 3 gram range, their fineness about 70%, and the (formerly rare, now scarce) issues of the Shahi governor Khudarayaka after the Samanid conquest of Kabul early in the 10th century CE continued in that fixed module. But with the assumption of power in that region of the Turks who are called by us Ghaznavids the practice began of striking coins without a fixed weight.  The range was not great - they were all about the same size, maybe the variance might only be from, say, 2 to 3.5 grams, but that was enough to cause problems in the petty economy.
    In a specie coinage without standard weight recourse was had to scales.  Those who possessed the scales and verified the weights had a lock on the economic system.  If you were a big player you had your own scales and you weighed your “coins” in bags.  If you were a little guy you had to take your transaction to the money shop and pay a fee to the guy with the scales to regularize the transaction.  Hassle.  Put a big crimp in the bottom end of the market.  Tendencies emerged for poor people to contract with a rich guy to handle their business for them, to be their bank, as it were.  From this situation sharecropping, debt slavery and permanent indenture (serfdom) emerged.
    By the last quarter of the 10th century the Turkish commanders of Ghazna in eastern Afghanistan were essentially independent, though still formally acknowledging the Samanid overlords.  The top gun, Sebuktegin, 977-97 CE, seeing the disruption of the economy by the land grab in progress, found himself with the political means to throw a wrench in the works, substituting cash payments for distribution of lands.  But he lacked the position and power (if not the will) to halt the substitution of stamped ingots for regulated coinage and relieve the squeeze on the local markets.
    That he had an interest in doing so would seem to be attested by the fact that the coins he introduced for circulation in the Ghazna area are very common.  Coins of the predecessor Samanids are somewhat polyglot and not so easy to find by and large.  But the coins of Sebuktegin the Ghaznavid occur in lots of hoards, large and small, put in the ground, one can assume, by the soldiers to whom they were paid.
    There are two main types, both about 70% silver, both named on the coin as “dirhams.”  The western style is “broad,” a bit larger than an American nickel, struck at various mints from Bamiyan in eastern Afghanistan to Nishapur in eastern Iran.  The other style, mainly from Ghazna and Farwan, north of Kabul, is struck on a planchet almost exactly the size of the old Shahi silver jital, though, as mentioned before, of variable weight.  Obviously it was meant to replace the jital, and if more proof were needed one could look at the rare elephant / lion copper, of the type that for two centuries had accompanied the Shahi jitals, with the name “Sebuktegin” in Arabic above the lion.
    Sebuktegin’s jital / dirhams have the mint and date are in a circle around the margin, but these are usually missing or illegible.  He acknowledged the Samanid overlord on his coins.  Dying in 997 CE he was briefly succeeded by an Isma’il, whose coins are rare, and then by Yamin-al-Daulah Mahmud, 997-1030, the famous (to some) Mahmud of Ghazna.
    Mahmud forswore his allegiance to the Samanids when he adopted the epithet “Yamin.”  He amused himself with conquests in Pakistan, taking lots of slaves and booty and granting fiefs to his troops in the region.  By the end of his reign Ghaznavid control extended as far east as Lahore, and raids were made deep into India as far as Mathura.
    If Sebuktegin’s dirhams are common Mahmud’s are abundant.  So-called “yamini” dirhams are found by the hundreds.  Weights are variable - these are technically ingots rather than coins, and there are many minor varieties.  A rare major variety is bilingual, with the Muslim profession of faith rendered in Arabic on one side and in Sanskrit on the other.  Struck in Lahore, where the dumpy bull and horseman coins of Ohind were the engine of commerce, they were evidently unpopular and were quickly discontinued.  It is highly likely that Mahmud’s people continued striking Samanta Deva type BH coins, but to this day none have been found with his name on them.
    Mahmud also conquered the southern tier of Pakistan, which is to say Baluchistan and Sind.  Sind was where the former caliphal governors, then independent amirs, had been striking the tiny silver coins called either dammas or qanhari dirhams.  Mahmud continued their issue and so did his successors until the end of the 11th century.  The Ghaznavid coins of Sind are supposed to be common, but when I looked through a couple of hundred pieces once I found not a one.  They were all amir Ahmad save for a couple each of Abdallah and Ali.  Maybe that batch was put in the ground before the Ghaznavids got there.
    And there is this other coin, a nice big “dinar” in gold, weighing almost 3 times what a dinar should, struck in “India the land of the jihad.” in 397 AH (1007 CE).  This extremely rare item is a boasting commemorative of one of Mahmud’s raids deep into India for burning, looting, and other pleasures.
    Mahmud put his son Muhammad in charge of Ghazna a few years before he died, and Muhammad briefly inherited the whole empire for a few months in 1031, issuing a rare yamini style dirham, before being deposed by a brother, Mas’ud.
    Mas’ud issued the first known Ghaznavid BH coins, at Lahore.  They are easy to distinguish from the mass of anonymous BH coins by the Arabic legends, “Mas’ud” and some other occasional words.  These Mas’udi BH coins, in the locally normal fineness of about 18%, are not particularly common.  The normal “yamini” dirhams of Ghazna, at 70%, are quite common, and farther to the west the “broad” dirhams continued as before.
    The divide in the coinage between 70% fine inscriptional dirhams in Afghanistan and 18% BH jitals in Lahore continued under successors Maudud I, 1041-50, Abd Al-Rashid, 1050-53, and Farrukhzad, 1053-59.  Maudud, after some time, eliminated the horseman in favor of his titles.  Sometimes mints and dates can be distinguished, occasionally those mints are some place other than Lahore.  Again, sometimes the marginal inscription was replaced by dots and lines.  Every now and then a little copper coin, usually Afghan, shows up that can be attributed to one of these rulers.  Coins of none of these rulers can be called common, though they are not particularly rare.
    Note that the weight of the Lahore BH coins is fixed at about 3.2 grams in contrast with the variable weight of the yamini dirhams of Afghanistan.  This would seem to point to strength in the merchant sector of Lahore, whose inhabitants could, evidently, stand up to the land grant soldiery in the latter’s quest for economic dominance.
    The next ruler, Ibrahim, 1059-99, seems to have put in place a partial reform of the yamini dirham, fixing the weight at 2.2 grams and thereby lubricating the Ghanzna bazaar, but this move was undercut by the introduction of some variable decline in the alloy.  The Lahore jital declined as well, to perhaps as little as 1% silver, maybe less.  The drastic decline in the metal value of the Lahore jital may have caused a run on the bullion stocks of Ghazna at the end of Ibrahim’s reign, which situation, according to a contemporary account, was rectified by the buying up of debased Lahore jitals by the government of the next ruler, Mas’ud III, 1099-1115.
    You are perhaps wondering “do I care about any of this stuff?”  Pakistan is far away, the coins are small and unimposing and difficult to read even if you can read Arabic.  But they are cheap and available.  You will find, here and there, BH coins and yamini dirhams, and if you can do something with them you can collect them while everyone else is looking for the latest British Royal Mint product or the impossible rare Russian coin with a big scratch to make it affordable.
    So, with Mas’ud III the yamini dirham became a coin rather than an ingot, though more debased than before the abovementioned bullion crisis, while the Lahore jital continued more or less as before.  Mas’ud’s yaminis are not particularly common, the companion Ghazna coppers are rare, but his lahoris are fairly easy to find.  Similar coins of successor Arslan, 1111-18, are rare, and the yaminis return to variable weight ingot status.  Coins of the next guy, Bahramshah, 1118-52, are common, as befits the issue of such a long reign.
    A couple of numismatic innovations of his time are worth noting.  One is the production, in among the Lahori bull / inscription type jitals, of a wholly inscriptional piece acknowledging the Seljuk sultan Sinjar as overlord.  The Seljuks provided crucial support for Bahram in his war of succession, and this scarce anomalous piece can be assumed to commemorate that fact.  The other is a series of bull / inscription copper coins with a one-word Arabic legend on the reverse.  This word has been read as “Raziyyah” and attributed to the Delhi sultans, but is perhaps more convincingly read as “Yamin,” part of the Bahram’s epithet.  In either case it marks the return of the subsidiary copper denomination to Pakistan after a hiatus of a couple of centuries.
    The next ruler, Khusru Shah, 1152-60, continued the coinage as before: yamini ingots in Ghazna, bull jitals in Lahore, and possibly another of those enigmatic coppers can be assigned to him, the one with “Mu’iz” on the reverse. They are all scarce.
    During the reign of the next and final Ghaznavid, Khusru Malik, 1160-86, Ghazna was taken by the Ghorids, and the capital moved to Lahore.  There are scarce yamini type dirhams from Ghazna before it was lost, and three distinct types of Lahori bull jitals, one far more common than the others.  And then there are the “new” coins.  At some point after the loss of Ghazna the bull type was abandoned at Lahore, replaced by an inscriptional type in three varieties.  The bull type reappears at a new mint in Kurraman, midawy between Ghazna and Peshawar.  Recall that the old yamini dirham was of considerably higher fineness than the Lahori jital.  This inscriptional jital was struck in a typical Lahori alloy of possibly 2% silver.
    Many of the Khusru Malik coins are common, some of them extremely so.
    The Ghaznavids were done in by the Ghorids, the same as took Ghazna early in the reign of Khusru Malik.  Ghor is northwest of Ghazna and southwest of Bamiyan in Afghanistan.  The Ghorids were local tribal chieftains who were tired, as all the locals were, of the rapacious, overbearing foreigners that the Ghaznavids never stopped being during their two centuries of dominance.  When the opportunity came they took it.
    This was, perhaps, more than you wanted to know about a dynasty of Turkish invaders in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India.  I think it is valuable to look at the processes of politics and economies of other times and places.  Those people with their funny names dealt with the same kind of conundrums we are dealing with today.  Should the dollar be forced up relative to the euro?  Does anyone care what the yen rate is these days?  Why are we not paying attention to the Chinese yuan?  Are we Americans slowly becoming industrial serfs courtesy of our mountains of personal debt?  An examination of how people of yore in exotic (to us) locations dealt with similar situations may provide clues for us as we stumble through the fog of our present predicaments.

    Allow me please to explain one aspect of Islamic names.  “Al-Din” is pronounced “ed-deen” and means “of the Faith.”  It is a convenient contraction of “Al-Dunya wa Al-Din,” which means “of the World and the Faith.”  Many Islamic rulers have this phrase as part of their expanded name in the form of “X Al-Din.”  Example: “Taj Al-Din” means “Crown of the Faith.  Often this phrase, called “laqab,” appears on the coin while the guy’s “real” name, Hasan, for instance, does not.
    Anyway, the mountainous province of Ghor is located east of Herat in far western Afghanistan.  It is and always has been considered to be very remote. The roads are terrible.  Local control is traditional.  There has been a tendency in metropolitan Kabul and Herat to think of the people living there as hicks.
    The sultan of Ghor, ‘Ala Al-Din Al-Husayn Jahansuz, sacked Ghazna, capital of the Ghaznavids previously discussed, in 1155, and burned it to the ground.  The Ghaznavids did not exactly recoup, but they did, for the moment, survive.
    Steve Album notes a few rare gold dinars and billon jitals of Jahansuz.  These would be local to Ghor itself.  (It is worth noting that new coin types are constantly coming to light in central and south Asia.  Entire new dynasties are occasionally recognized.)
    In 1163 two brothers became the bosses of Ghor.  The elder is known to history as Ghiyath Al-Din Muhammad bin Sam and the younger Mu’iz Al-Din Muhammad bin Sam, to be referred to hereafter, as is traditional when discussing these people, as Ghiyath and Muhammad.  In Pakistan, where Muhammad is a very important guy, he is called Muhammad Ghori, from his home town.
    In 1173 Muhammad, the younger firebrand, made a short trip eastward with a band of desperados and captured the town of Ghazna from the nasty Ghaznavids who had been oppressing everyone in the region for nigh on two centuries.  The Ghaznavid government fled eastward all the way to Lahore, on the border of Hindustan, now known as India.
    Two years later Muhammad captured Herat in western Afghanistan, then turned around and rode all the way to Sind, which he took.  He kept going, annihilating the Ghaznavids in 1186 and moving into India proper, where he took Delhi in 1192 and far away Bengal 1194.  The Ghorid realm stretched thus from the Iranian border to Burma.  Muhammad was the first of the sultans of Delhi, who contolled northern India and parts of Pakistan for most of 4 centuries.  The empire he created surpassed that of the Mauryas 13 centuries before.  He is considered a national hero in Pakistan, which of course means that he is considered a villain in India.
    The coins of the brothers are many and varied, with some of them carrying names and titles of both, while others cannot be definitively assigned to one or the other.  Traditionally the western issues are assigned to Ghiyath, the eastern issues to Muhammad, those in the middle (eastern Afghanistan and the Pakistani Northwest Frontier) are left hanging unless they clearly name one or the other brother.  In Afghanistan there were silver or billon dirhams, heavy and light, which passed by weight.  The western coins were “broad” like the Iranian issues with which they competed, while the eastern coins were smaller and more compact like the “yamini” dirhams that they superceded.
    Album describes all of Ghiyath’s coins as scarce and rare, ditto for the Afghan issues of Muhammad.  My records tell me I had one of Muhammad’s Ghazna “double dirhams” (billon coin a bit smaller than a half dollar) once, and evidently sold it too cheap.  There are relatively scarce jitals, typically with a horseman brandishing a spear, some with an elephant - mounted or not, others mimicking previous types.  And there are some scarce coppers.
    The most common coins of Muhammad bin Sam hail from newly conquered India, where there was all of that bullion to be plundered.  Most common at the moment, unusually, are some gold coins.  These items, copied directly from those of the previous rulers of Kanauj and Banares, weigh about 4 grams, which is half the weight of the old Kushan gold coins.  We have been in the habit of calling all of these gold coins “staters,” which is simply a term of convenience.  We don’t know what they were called.
    The “staters” in question have a schematic diagram of a naked female human on one side, identified as the goddess Lakshmi, with Muhammad’s name in Nagari on the other.  There are two writing styles, one attributed to Kanauj, the other to Bayana, the latter much more common at the moment.
    It is noteworthy, I think, that I am finding literally masses of Ghaznavid jitals thrust at me at the moment, but very few Ghorids.  Evidently Muhammad was too busy marauding to take care of the coinage, except for the big guys at Bayana, who needed those gold coins to do whatever it was that they were doing.  And tell me, please, why so many of them are found in Northwest Frontier Province, hundreds of miles from where they were made?  Probably has something to do with the horse trade, which was THE strategic business back then.
    Well, Ghiyath Muhammad died in 1203 and Mu’iz Muhammad ruled his swollen empire alone until 1206, when he was assassinated by some person unknown.  There being no children, the empire was divided.  A nephew, Mahmud, succeeded in Ghor.  The east passed to various of the generals who had conducted Mu’iz Muhammad’s campaigns.  These generals were purchased slaves, hence the term “slave kings of Delhi.”  Ghazna and its environs was ruled by slave general Taj Al-Din Yildiz.  Sind was administered by slave general Nasir Al-Din Qubacha, while Delhi went to slave general Qutb Al-Din Aybak.
    All of these guys struck coins, though those of Aybak are anonymous, and therefore assumed or inferred.
    For the nephew, Mahmud, there is the usual gamut of types: the western gold coins and silver dirhams, and the various jitals of eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan.  All of them are scarcer than those of his uncle, and most are rare.  Mahmud was deposed in 1212 by the Khwarezmshah, ‘Ala Al-Din Muhammad, the guy who picked a fight with Chingis.  Very interesting, the coinage of ‘Ala Al-Din.  Pakistan was really the outskirts of his empire, briefly about twice the size of Texas.  Some of his Afghan coins are very common.  There are jitals from Pakistani Kurraman, the type imitated elsewhere, notably at Peshawar, which may not have had a mint since it was Pushkalavati in Kushan times.
    Yildiz, 1206-15, in Ghazna, struck jitals at various Afghan mints and Lahore, some rather prolifically, gold dinars and silver dirhams are rare.  He was caught between a rock and a hard place, attacked from the east by Delhi and from the west by the Khwarezmshah.  Aybak of Delhi caught him and killed him.  Qubacha, in Sind and Punjab until 1228, struck jitals in two styles, one for Lahore and one for Delhi, both moderately common.  He was attacked from the east by the Delhi sultan, and then from the west by Chingis Khan.  Chingis was in turn displaced by the son of the Khwarezmshah, Jalal Al-Din Mangubarni, who was fleeing the Mongol onslaught in Afghanistan.  Qubacha’s remaining territories in Punjab were taken by Delhi on his death.
    Mangubarni is a great Islamic hero, and his story deserves to be rehearsed here.  When Chingis Khan blew away ‘Ala Al-Din Khwarezmshah Jalal continued resisting when all was lost.  He went to Afghanistan and put together a coalition that actually defeated the Mongols, and severely at that, with booty captured and great loss on the Mongol side.  The coalition then promptly fell to internecine bickering, as Afghans are wont to do.  Chingis was a guy who never let a grudge go unnursed.  He invaded and and basically depopulated most of Afghanistan, driving Jalal eastward to the Indus River in Pakistan.  Cornered by the river, Jalal kept fighting.  Down to a few fighters, he threw the treasury in the river, drowned the women, and with his men plunged into the water, making it safely to the other side, supposedly with only seven retainers.  Chingis, according to the legend, said to his own sons "Such a son must a father have."  Jalal went on to have a successful career in Sind and Punjab as a marauding potentate before departing westward to Azerbaijan, then on to Iraq for more therapeutic warfare, on which venture he died in 1231.  In Pakistan he issued jitals in both the Delhi and Lahore styles, not common, but not rare either.
    Now for Delhi.  The anonymous coins of Aybak, 1206-10, would have to be some of the coppers with legends that translate “Just,” “the Sultan,” “the kingdom,” “Delhi,” etc.  They’re small, rare, usually worn, and maybe not his.  He was briefly succeeded by a son, Aram Shah, for whom no coins are known. Aram was not accepted by the nobles, and control passed to a slave general, Iltutmish, who was a son-in-law of Aybak.
    Iltutmish, 1210-35, was a major figure, the first “slave king.”  He reconstituted the eastern part of the Delhi empire, forcing the submission of the sultan of Bengal and annexing Sind.  The west - Afghanistan - was lost to the Mongols.
    In keeping with normal practice, Iltutmish’s coinage followed local norms.  In Bengal there were big silver tankas, basically early versions of rupees, and a few gold coins.  Tankas were also struck in Delhi for trade in the east.  For local use in Delhi there were billon jitals in the normal Delhi style with the schematic bull and horseman.  For the west - Pakistan - there were other jitals in the Lahore style.  Some had legend / horseman types, others legends only, some all in Arabic, others in Arabic and Nagari.  There are common jitals and rare ones.  Finally, there are small coppers, probably all from Delhi, most anonymous.  Some of them must belong to Iltutmish, though it’s really impossible to assign them.
    It is likely that there was some degree of economic autonomy at Lahore, resented by the national government at Delhi.  The Lahore coins not only looked different from the Delhis, they had different value, with almost twice as much silver.  The Lahore issues were preferred, for obvious reasons, to the point that the contemporary independent issues of Qubacha in Sind were struck to the Lahore standard in the Lahore style.
    A debased currency benefits the government that issues it because of the increased cut.  When that government’s money is losing out in the market to a finer coin it might get a bit testy.  There was, evidently, no love to lose between the Lahore merchants and the Delhi bureaucrats.  Thus, when the Mongols came again in 1241, Lahore, their first objective, was not defended.  The garrison there made a token attack and then retreated toward Delhi.  This was not the total disaster it should have been.  Evidently the merchants had an arrangement with the Mongols, and the city was spared, though it was removed from the control of Delhi.
    So here we are in the mid-13th century.  Pakistan is separated from India, aligned with Afghanistan under the Mongol yoke.  The stage is about to go dark, numismatically and politically speaking, when one more historical character wanders on the stage, leaving us some coins to collect.  A guy named  Sayf Al-Din Hasan Qarlugh came out of Afghanistan.  Evidently he had helped the Mongols and then walked away.  He took Kurraman in Sind, still standing after the passage of the Mongols.  Kurraman had a couple of centuries of coin production behind it, and it turned out some for the new boss Qarlugh.  These coins are rather scarce.
    After 1249 or so Hasan was succeeded by his son, Nasir (terminal date unknown).  And Nasir produced this interesting series of jital-shaped coins in copper, Arabic legend around a prancing horse, Nagari legend on the other side.  They are rather common, and there are more than 20 varieties with tiny changes to the design that have to be some kind of secret marks.  Tye cogently supposes that these coins had to do with the revival of a major horse market, imagining that one had to change one’s “real” money at the gate for these copper “tokens,” which, to turn the screw a bit tighter, had an “expiration date” revealed to the fiscal guards by the secret marks.  No corroborating evidence for this theory. Very mysterious.
    And after Nasir fades from the scene the eastern Afghan-western Pakistan region becomes a wild and anarchic region,  locally controlled by unremembered warlords.  North of Afghanistan the Mongol state devolved into statelets.  To the east the Delhi sultans stepped through the pages of their history.  Lahore became a frontier town for Delhi.  In most of what is now Pakistan no coins were struck for almost three hundred years.
    I could not believe it when I got to the 14th century and found no references to coins in what is now Pakistan.  Mitchiner has none.  Valentine has none.  Album has none.  Album was available for consultation, so I asked him.  He confirmed my worst fear.  No coins in Pakistan at that time and for a few centuries after.
    This is very strange.  In world history, or at least in Eurasian history (not counting the nomad lands), where there were people there was money, which until the 20th century almost always meant coins.  There are some other places where the people stayed but there were no coins struck, but they are few and far between, and tend to be in out of the way places like Yemen.
    So what happened?  The people didn’t all disappear.  They didn’t stop doing business, and with about 2000 years of coin use under their belts they probably didn’t stop using coins.  It would seem, though, that during the course of about 300 years only a few local coins were issued here and there in the well populated territory that is now Pakistan, and the business was conducted almost entirely in foreign coins.
    Which foreign coins?  Mostly, it would seem, those of the sultans of Delhi, who were issuing gold, silver, billon, and copper, and these would have drifted out into the countryside from the Delhisultan city of Lahore (where coins were not being struck).  Over in the west there was a succession of local dynasties in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and so forth, issuing mostly silver and copper coins, with a few golds here and there, and some of those coins, quite different from the Delhi issues, would have filtered down from the northwest into the bazaars of Peshawar.  In the south, where the Indian Ocean trade was, silver and copper coins would come from the west coast of India - the land of the Bahmanis, sultans of Gujerat, etc.  All of these kinds of coins are found in Pakistan in small quantities.  The general impression arises that the whole region became something of an impoverished backwater for a while.
    Pakistan wasn’t anything like a country in the 14th century.  The Delhi writ stopped at Lahore on the present day border, and ran northward towards Kashmir, where a Muslim adventurer usurped the throne of the formerly Hindu kingdom in 1346.  The Hindu kingdom, it seems was not striking coins at that time, and neither did the Muslims until about 80 years later.  The Northwest Frontier was a sort of “no-go” zone with only the most local of governments. Baluchistan had no coins and no government to speak of in the hinterland, and a bit of coastal trade.  Sind had a good sized port at Tatta, but no coins.  Around 1350 an Islamic dynasty known as the Jams came to power in Sind.  They issued a few rare copper coins in the 15th century, none of which have I seen even pictures of, though they have been written up by Stan Goron, who wrote, with J.P. Goenka, the current book on the Delhi Sultans, etc.
    Tamerlane rolled over the region at the end of the 14th century on his way to attacking Delhi, and theoretically what we now call Pakistan became part of his empire.  But he neglected almost everything in favor of war, struck no coins in the area, and it slipped away from his successors into the local control that we refer to as anarchy.  Imagine Somalia.  Like that.  Delhi began to expand its control westward through the 15th century, but struck no coins in Pakistan until the end of the 16th century.  They spent, it seems, an inordinate amount of their time and treasure on dynastic squabbles, besides having to constantly deal with threats from neighbors (when Delhi was not threatening them).
    The factors that would bring the doddering Delhi sultanate to an end were developing.  Way over to the northwest, in Farghana, a region now divided between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, a great grandson of Tamerlane, Babar by name, became the local ruler in the normal way on the death of the previous ruler, his father, in 1494.  He was 11 or 12 years old.
    Babar’s father had spent his life unsuccessfully trying to conquer nearby Samarqand.  This was like Albany trying to conquer New York City.  Babar tried too, more than once.  The Uzbeks of Samarqand swatted him in 1501, kicking him out of Farghana.  Babar came to Badakshan in northeastern Afghanistan, which he conquered in 1503.  From there he expanded his rule south to Kabul in 1505, Qandahar in 1507, and so forth.  He made a number of forays toward India with no permanent results until 1525.
    In that year the Delhi sultan, Ibrahim Lodi, recorded by history as quite unpleasant, had thoroughly alienated the governor of Punjab, who invited Babar to come in, maybe he could improve the situation.  Babar was delighted, it was what he had wanted to do for almost two decades.  Quick as a wink there he was in Lahore, where he deposed the governor who had invited him in.  Like the middle sized monkey beating on the small monkey after the big monkey beat him, the governor went and attacked the Delhi sultan.  He failed, but the Delhi government was accordingly weakened by the exertion.  Babar thought things looked really good right then, so into India he went.  The forces met at Panipat on April 20, 1526.  Ibrahim of Delhi had a bigger army, but his troops were tired and they didn’t like him.  Babar carried the day.  Ibrahim was killed and Babar occupied Delhi and Agra.
    Now Babar was descended from Tamerlane on his father’s side.  On his mother’s side the ancestor of note was none other than Chingis Khan, the Mongol.  300 years later in another language “Mongol” had become “Moghul,” and EVERYONE has heard of the Moghuls, haven’t they?  Babar was the first of the Moghuls of India.
    Babar did strike coins, so you can collect a relic of this great historical figure.  Actually, he struck coins in Lahore, evidently the first coins of that city in three centuries.  These are silver tankas called “shahruhis.”  They look like Timurid coins and, although Steve Album describes them as “relatively common,” they are not going to be found in the average stock of your run of the mill dealer in Indian coins.  There are some coppers too, struck in Agra in India, and also scarce.  These kind of things might be found in a bucket full of similar coins over in Punjab, so if you know what you’re looking for you might get lucky.  There’s no way to proceed without actually learning how to read the coins.  Difficult as it may seem at the beginning, it can be done.
    The pot continued to boil in northern south Asia.  Babar died in 1530, succeeded by son Humayun.  Fine and dandy for the young Moghul dynasty, except that over on the east coast of India a minister of the defunct Delhi sultan government had not only held out, but had expanded his operation into a real threat.  This guy was an Afghan, Sher Shah Suri.
    Humayun, meanwhile, was attempting to consolidate his holdings.  This was not easy, considering he was a foreigner with a small army.  He did strike coins in the styles of his father.  The silver tankas are rare, the coppers, thick and dime sized, referred to by us as half dams, are available.
    Humayun had marched into Bengal in far northeastern India in 1544, but 2 years later Sher Shah kicked him out and pursued him all the way back into Pakistan and beyond to the Afghan border.  Sher Shah thus reconstituted the Delhi sultanate to the borders of its glory days; one government from Peshawar to what is now Bangladesh.
    Sher Shah, say the references, reformed the currency.  The old Delhi money consisted of rare little coppers and “tankas” of low grade billon.  The Moghuls had struck some silver for their troops and coppers for the bazaar of Agra.  All of a sudden here are these large, one might say oversize fine silver rupees the size of half dollars, and full sized copper “dams,” big and thick, with mostly rare fractions in both metals.  Where did the bullion come from?  The references don’t say, but I think a good guess might be... Bengal, where they had been making big silver coins for several centuries.
    The Suri coins were struck at a number of mints.  There was minimal local variation in types.  A couple of square silver coins are known, all rare.  There was one mint in Pakistan, Bhakkar in northern Sind.  The honorific title of this town, Shergarh, was applied to several other mints, so that one cannot nail the town unless its name is actually on the coin.
    Sher Shah died in 1545 while campaigning agains rebellious vassals.  He was succeeded by a son who took the ceremonial name Islam Shah.  There was another son, and a dynastic succession war broke out which weakened the Suri state.  You wouldn’t see that weakness from examining Islam’s coins, which remain big and, for the most part, common.  Islam died in 1554 after a troubled reign.  The Suri domain split between contenders at that point.  Each of the rivals struck coins, mostly rare.  Humayun, watching from Afghanistan, thought he saw his star rising in the east.  He came roaring back into Pakistan, took Lahore, then Delhi, putting an end to the Suris.  Then Humayun died in 1556, the result of a fall.  There are a few copper half dams struck in Agra with dates 962 and 963, just like the common ones of the 940s.  The successor was the 13 year old Akbar.
    A lot of words have been written about Akbar the Great.  The fashion of contemporary writing about rulers was to paint them either white or black and it is therefore a bit of a chore to get a balanced picture of the guy and what he did.  Briefly, he ruled a gigantic empire for 49 years, fought wars, made peace, was illiterate or nearly so, thought deeply about the problems of the day, attempted major administrative and economic reforms, and finally attempted to found a new religion.
    His efforts were not uniformly successful.  He did not win all of his wars, his reforms created some severe dislocations that resulted in local famines and deaths.  The religion he put together in an attempt to reconcile and unify the Hindu and Muslim faiths attracted about 15 disciples and disappeared the moment he drew his last breath, leaving bitterness that developed into the reactionary anti-Hindu policies of his successors which contributed to the decline of the Mughals and ended up with the divided subcontinent we have today.
    The focus of the Mughals was India rather than what we now call Pakistan.  They were always fighting wars in the south.  The western provinces were reasonably peaceful in the 16th and 17th centuries.  The flash points of history were elsewhere.
    Well, Akbar’s coins, like his reign, can be conveniently divided into three parts.  The early period of his minority and early adulthood has left us broad silver rupees that look more or less like Suri coins, struck mostly at Indian mints, but also at Pakistani locations such as Lahore.  A series of thick, square rupees began in the 1570s.  These coins became extremely popular among later generations of Indians, and copies have been made by jewelers “just for fun” ever since.  Round rupees in the “normal” Indian “dump” form began in 1592, using the “Ilahi” dates of Akbar’s new religion, year 1 being that of Akbar’s accession.  There are a veritable multitude of mints, including Lahore, Bhakkar, Tatta, and Peshawar in Pakistan (and Kabul and Qandahar in Afghanistan).  Silver fractions exist, and are scarce.  Note that Ilahi dated coins have the Persian month of issue on them, and frequently some part of the critical information is disappointingly off the flan.
    The main copper coin was the dam of about 19 grams.  Some of them are 10mm thick!  The pre-Ilahi coins have the date written out in Persian, and it is not unusual to find coins that read “nine hundred...” and the vital rest of the date is not there.  Similarly with the Ilahi coins: frequently the last digit is missing. Lahore is a common mint for dams.  There are fractions, all scarcer than full dams.  Typically all of the mint and date information is off the flan, you can’t pin the coin down, so you throw it into the get-to-it-later box and it stays there until you die.
    A few rare gold coins of Akbar too.  Hardly any available.  Rich Indians get them.
    All of Akbar’s conquests and warfare produced some special local issues during campaigns and early occupation periods.  There were also temporary vassal states here and there on the periphery.  Among these was a Turkish dynasty in Sind, the Arghun Tarkhans, who ruled in the 1560s-70s.  Pleasantly enough, they struck coins.  These are coppers, your typical “paisa” size coins, like a thick nickel, with a bird standing with folded wings on one side, dates in the 980s AH and the mint, Tatta, on the other.  Evidently very rare coins.  Certainly I’ve never had any.  You can see some pictures on the web at this address: http://www215.pair.com/sacoins/public_html/punjabsind/punjabsind_6_baq.htm.

    Pakistan has always been associated with northern India and Afghanistan, but it is a different place.  Usually it was the neighbors who ruled the region, only a couple of time in history was it a power center.  It is on its own now, with its own unique perspective on its history.  If you want to see how differently people can see the same thing do a web search for “Mughal” or “Moghul.”  You will find Pakistani and Indian sites giving diametrically opposed interpretations of their mutual history.  Very interesting.  From the Pakistani point of view the time of the Mughals was wondrous and triumphant, at least for the first two centuries.  The Indians have a perspective that is, shall we say, more nuanced.
    And, in the Pakistani context, the Mughal story ends in the 18th century, when the region was divided between Afghans, Sikhs, and local rulers.  And then of course the 19th century is all about how people dealt with the British and vice versa.
    Well, as my biochemistry teacher used to say, we’ve got a lot to cover. Let’s get started.
    “Akbar” means “great,” as in the familiar Arabic phrase “Allahu akbar,” which means “God is great.”  Akbar the Mughal died in 1605.  He left to his son and successor Jahangir (“world holder”) an empire enormous and rich.  There was peace at the center, but the neighbors were all adversaries, whether at actual war or in treaty or truce.  Jahangir continued the processes that Akbar had put in motion.  Wars continued on the periphery, and a tolerant and relatively pleasant policy was pursued within.  The empire became even richer.
    Some may argue that this is not the case, but there seems to be a tendency in human societies, when there is enough wealth, for a separation of classes, like oil and water.  The very rich become distant from the very poor, and there develops a tendency to neglect the needs of the bottom in favor of the pleasures of the top.
    One can, perhaps, see this tendency developing in the reign of Jahangir. There was quite a bit of fancy architecture produced in the capital, Agra, where the emperor could enjoy it.  Poetry abounded, music too.  And it is said that in his time the famous miniature painting style reached a degree of development never since attained.
    At the same time, there were some interesting changes in the coinage that reflect a concentration on the interests of the top and a corresponding accelerating neglect of the bottom.  Very simply, copper was the coin of the bottom, the retail food market, etc.  If there was plenty of copper the peasants would tend towards happiness.  Silver was the coin of the small businessman, and gold was for the royals, the generals, the real estate brokers, etc.
    Akbar was a serious coiner of copper, a moderate producer or silver, and his gold is not that easy to find (and tends to be gobbled up by Indian collectors before it has a chance to get out of the country).  In Jahangir’s time the opposite happened.  Copper was neglected, there were plenty of silver rupees, and a lot of gold.  Jahangir was the one who had those giant gold coins made, the 100 mohurs, and the 500s, and the 1000!  Imagine that: 1000 mohurs, 11 plus kilograms.  Of course that “coin” was just for leaving in the treasury, where the emperor and his friends could admire it.  And then maybe he’d give a favored person a 5 mohur coin or something, for the “Oh, wow!” effect.  But copper - who cares?
    He had lots of special coins made.  He’s the one who made the zodiac coins, the portrait coins, heavy coins, square coins, little and big “scatter” coins for public appearances and ceremonies.  All rare, or virtually rare.  Meaning you won’t find them unless you look for them, usually for a long time.
    And of course, if they’re unattributed, you won’t recognize them unless you know how to read them.  And there is a reasonable chance, especially with fractional coins and copper, that the attribution is partly or wholly wrong.  None of us get it right all the time.
    Anyway, ordinary Jahangiri rupees are harder to find than Akbaris, and nowhere near as common as the next guy, Shah Jahan.  The Pakistani mints of Lahore, Tatta, Bhakkar, Khairpur, Multan, and Jalalabad are not uncommon.  The special rupees are all scarce or rare.  The zodiac coins have been copied by jewelers since day one, and most of what is around are such.  Fractions and copper are scarce and rare.  Gold mohurs in general are not rare, but they come one at a time, and anything in particular that you want; a mint or date or type, is likely to be hard to find.
    Jahangir died in 1627 and a younger son, to be known as Shah Jahan, was to take over.  But he was in the south, campaigning, and a grandson, Dawar Bakhsh, ruled as a place holder for 3 months until Shah Jahan could get back to the capital.  There is a Dawari rupee, of Lahore as it happens.  Very expensive, practically unobtainable.
    Shah Jahan presided over perhaps the richest period of the Mughal sway. He built the Taj Mahal, the ceiling of which was formerly hidden by a curtain of pearls.  His monetary policy was nurturing; there was a lot of copper (though not as much as Akbar), and there are more rupees and mohurs available today than for any other Mughal.  A few multiples, a few fractionals, some presentation type things, all rare.  A particular problem is that on many rupees the mint was written near the edge of the die and is off the flan.  Premium, then, for full mint, date, and regnal year.  In Pakistan, Lahore was a very prolific mint for Shah Jahan, Multan and Tatta, not too bad.
    As Shah Jahan lay dying in 1657 a three way war of succession broke out among his sons.  The “other” two guys were in the south and don’t count in the Pakistani context.  The winner was Aurangeb Alamgir.
    From Akbar through Jahangir the Moghul government was secular and tolerant.  Shah Jahan reintroduced Islam as the state religion but continued to take it easy on the Hindus.  Aurangzeb reintroduced discrimination, throwing them out of the government, differentially taxing them.  There is argument about how bad he was.  In India they say he was terrible, a miserable bigot.  In Pakistan they say he was not all that bad.  It would seem from the results that the Indian view is closer to the truth.  He started out with expansionist military campaigns, overreached, overtaxed the peasants to pay for his policies.  Economic dislocations occurred, disaffection grew.  By the end of his reign in 1707 the empire had shrunk a bit, and after his death regional warlords emerged, marking the birth of the so-called “native states.”
    Withal, Aurangzeb’s coins are, by and large, common, and there is quite a bit of copper.  The basic coins are the rupee and the mohur.  Fractions are scarce.  As usual, there are a few oddball denominations.  Again, for rupees, Lahore is a common mint, Tatta and Multan less so.
    Onward and downward.  On Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 once again three sons fought for the throne.  The winner was Shah Alam I Bahadur, crowned, as it happened, in Lahore.  He ruled for five years, issued reasonably common rupees and mohurs from mints that included those of Pakistan.
    Five years was not enough time to get much done, so the mess left by Bahadur’s father was not cleaned up.  When he died there was yet another undisciplined war of succession.  You’d think the family would learn from its mistakes but no, that didn’t happen.  Jahandar Shah won the 1712 war, but he only ruled for a year.  His rupees are not impossible to find, but they are not common.
    Which reminds me.  After you’ve laboriously learned how to read “Lahore” you will often find that coins from there do not have that word, using instead the title of the city: “Dar al-Sultanat” (Abode of the Ruler).  This can be problematic, as the epithet was used by no less than four other cities.  Epithets began to be used in Akbar’s time, and continued to the end of the Moghul line.
    Now the general situation with 18th century Moghul copper is that your average coin has neither mint nor date nor emperor’s name on it, though they were on the die.  Usually what’s there is worthless: “struck” or “shah” or “reign” or the first two digits of the date.  The important stuff is missing, you’re forced back into style analysis, which only maybe 10 people in the west know anything about, and even then you often get only a tentative and partial attribution.  Into the “later” box it goes, to be puzzled over by someone else some day.
    Where was I?  Oh, Jahandar Shah the Moghul died in battle in 1713 after a year of “rule.”  There was a rebellion sponsored by a ministerial family, the Sayyids, who promoted a guy named Farrukhsiyar as a puppet.  When he tried to gain some control his handlers had him executed (1719).  Farrukhsiyari rupees are not uncommon, mohurs can be had, fractions of both are rare, as is copper.  The Pakistani mints are all represented.  Lahore rupees are common.
    The Sayyids replaced Farrukhsiyar first with a guy named Rafi Al-Derajat. He was not compliant enough, so they killed him after a few months and put up his brother, Rafi Al-Daula, known as Shah Jahan II.  They didn’t like him either, so they disposed of him as well.  A rebellion by Muhammad Ibrahim was crushed and one more puppet put up, called Muhammad Shah.  This one managed to get control of the situation and killed the Sayyids.
    Needless to say, the coins of these ephemeral rulers are at least scarce and mostly rare, worth significantly more than the prices in the SCWC.
    Muhammad Shah had the oomph to get rid of his handlers, but he was basically a fun guy, not an administrator, and he let things drift during his nearly three decades on the throne.  His coins are normal Moghul types.  Rupees are common, everything else in every metal is scarce.  The normal Pakistani mints were active, with the addition of Peshawar (scarce) and Derajat (rare).
    There was a major loss of territory during the reign of Muhammad Shah. Southern and eastern provinces slipped away.  To the west there came a disaster in the form of the marauding Iranian king, Nadir Shah.
    Nadir was a military man who came to dominate the Iranian government in the 1720s.  After deposing the old shah and installing that unfortunate’s infant son as a puppet for a few years Nadir took the throne for himself in 1736.  He continued to fight everyone on every side, and in 1738 he invaded India.  Lahore was sacked, then Delhi.  Nadir carried off everything of value: the pearl ceiling curtain of the Taj Mahal, the koh-i-noor diamond, tons of gold and silver.  Then he retired from India, but kept most of Pakistan until his assassination in 1747.
    Nadir struck a few coins while he was in India proper.  All of them are rare.  He liked to strike coins, and did so at the Mughal Pakistani mints of Bhakkar, Tatta, Multan, Peshawar and Lahore as well as at “Sind.”  Nadiri silver coins are not too hard to find, but the eastern mints are quite a bit more difficult than those of Iran proper.  The Indian coins are mentioned in the Iran section of the SCWC, but they are not listed there, nor could I find them anywhere else in that book.
    Nadir had become quite nasty in the latter part of his reign, and immediately on his death Afghanistan defected under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Durrani, who thus became by default the master of western Pakistan.

    I had stumbled upon a conundrum.  It seemed, upon perusal of the appropriate sections in the Afghanistan and Indian sections of the Standard Catalog, that there was a period of about five years in which the mint at Lahore struck coins for both Ahmad Shah Durrani the Afghan and Ahmad Shah Bahadur the Mughal.  It was disturbing.
    When I find myself with a problem involving Islamic numismatics I always ask Stephen Album, like a kid who makes a mess always yells “Mommy!”  Usually I get the answer succinctly and immediately.  When I asked about this two kings in the same city for 5 years problem I got the response that it was too complicated to go into, he was going to send me some pages from the Encyclopedia of Islam.  Turns out that Lahore went back and forth I don’t know how many times - many.  And there were other powers involved - not just the Afghan and the Mughal.  Some occupations lasted only a couple of weeks.  You recall that coinage was a symbol of sovereignty in Islamic politics, like waving the flag.  They would conquer a town and strike coins there the very next day.  That will account for any odd coin of any given year that might show up from Lahore in the period of roughly 1748-1752.
    I asked Steve if he could supply me with a Lahore pair of the same year, one for the Afghan, the other for the Mughal.  Answer: no.  Maybe successive dates, but that wouldn’t be the same, would it?  Steve reminded me that Islamic die engravers back then made mistakes all the time, got dates wrong, recut things, borrowed old dies, overstruck coins - dozens of ways to mess things up.  The other possibility - the coins struck during the couple of weeks this guy or that was in town - would lead to some very rare coins.  (The listings in the SCWC all have cheap prices.)
    Sure, but had he actually seen this overlap?  Did the subject come up in the discussions at the ONS and so forth?
    Um, no.
    I’d like to suggest that this situation be looked into.  There may be rare coins hiding in those listings.  Or maybe those listings are all messed up.  One thing I’d consider completely probable - those overlap dates (1165 AH for example) - if they exist one of the pair is going to be rare.
    At any rate, in the mid-18th century the Northwest Frontier (think Peshawar) was firmly in Afghan hands.  The Mughals held bits and pieces of Pakistani Punjab.  One might find a rupee from Multan or Dera or Sahrind.  But not very often.  The Mughals were fading out of Pakistan and their numismatic residue becomes progressively hard to find.  By the end of the 18th century it is gone.
    In the northeast the Mughals were replaced by the Sikhs.  I should devote an entire article to the Sikhs but it won’t be this one.  They began with a charismatic guy who successfully preached the unity of all faiths until his death of natural causes in 1539.  The Sikhs prospered during the rule of the Mughal Akbar but repression began in the reign of Jahangir.  They immediately switched over to militancy and proceeded to refine their military prowess through a long series of lost battles.  But they did not give up, and in the late 18th century they became preiminent in the Punjab and Kashmir.
    There was a brief occupation of Lahore by the Sikhs in 1756, during which some rare coins were struck, mentioned but not listed in the SCWC.  A longer lasting political domination of Pakistani Punjab began in the 1760s.
    Most Sikh coins found nowadays are from Amritsar in Kashmir.  There are coppers, common in aggregate, with scarce and rare varieties.  The coppers come with different marks; flags, crosses, etc., whose sequence and meanings are not at this time eludidated.  Amritsar rupees are usually somewhat scarce, but a large batch went on the market last year.  Silver fractions and gold are scarce and rare.  Coins from the other mints are not seen very often.  There is substantial interest by Sikhs in their coins, resulting in a general market scarcity of all but the commonest Amritsar coppers.
    At the end of the 18th century the situation in Pakistan became increasingly fluid.  If you follow the timelines for many of the mint cities you will find Afghan periods, Sikh periods, Mughal interludes.  And, as the 19th century began, you will begin to discern the increasingly visible hand of the British East India Company.
    I should explain how business was conducted throughout our zone of interest at the dawn of the 19th century.  There was copper, substantially local, and going by the piece at the bottom and by weight for larger transactions.  The copper floated against the silver rupee, which was used for middle transactions.  Silver fractions, as we have seen, were generally not present.  Rupees were carefully weighed and a provisional assessment of fineness made by the local money changer.  The rupees, local and foreign, were assigned daily values against each other.  The local rulers would add their laws to the mix, preferring whatever coin they happened to prefer, and their decrees would be obeyed or not as the case happened to be.  Gold sat in bags and was never seen.  (Who today finds mohurs in grades like VG?)
    So, early in the 19th century, there was a declining Afghan presence in western Pakistan, a Sikh zone in the east expanding toward the west and south, and regions of growing local control towards the south.  No Mughals, they’ve shrunk into lords of Delhi and have become British puppets.  It is the start of the “native states” or “princely states” period.
    Let's briefly examine the 19th century developments of the Sikhs, including their eclipse at the hands of the British, and the emergence of the Pakistani states: the amirs of Sind, Bahawalpur, Kalat, and Bela.
    Sikh coinage, briefly described above, continued into the 19th century. The greatest extant of the Sikh borders came in the late 1830s, when they took Peshawar from the Afghans.  Inside, the government was a difficult organization of local warlords, sometimes working together, sometimes not.  One guy, Ranjit Singh, became dominant until his death in 1839, after which civil war broke out amongst the warlords.  The British company, which had had a treaty with Ranjit Singh since 1809, became concerned, and attempted to stick its toe into the mess.  The Sikhs attacked in force in 1845, were soundly beaten.  The victorious British put the screws to the Sikhs, taking territory, financial indemnity, forcing a reduction in the size of the army, and requiring the acceptance of a British company agent at court.  A second revolt in 1848 resulted in another defeat for the Sikhs.  The British then dissolved the Sikh government and annexed its remaining territories.
    As for 19th century Sikh coins, these are what are usually found: single paisas of Amritsar mint, and that rupee hoard I mentioned above was evidently all from Amritsar too.  Things that exist but are not generally seen are special large coppers, silver fractions down to eighth rupees, and gold coins.  Coins from the other mints are all scarce or rare.  Local coppers from the Punjabi towns of Dera and nearby Derajat are not impossible to find, though they come one at a time instead of by the kilogram like coppers from, for instance, Jodhpur.  There’s a picture in the SCWC of a rupee from Dera, but that coin does not turn up.
    Down in Sind little local power centers developed around Bhakkar, Shikarpur, Tatta, and “Hyderabad.”  All of these  ephemeral entities emerged from direct Afghan control into feudal relationships and were terminated by absorption into the British zone.
    Bhakkar was the capital of the amirs of Khairpur, who issued rupees from the 1820s through 1843.  You don’t see these coins very often.  After the British takeover characteristic coins continued for another decade, and these are no more common than the independent coins.  From Shikarpur come some thick and dumpy coppers, occasionally seen, almost alway without date.  Afghan style rupees with the names of the Durrani shah are known from “Sind” (probably Bhakkar), Tatta, and “Hyderabad.”  This last is not “the” Hyderabad, which was and remains a big chunk of southern India, but a town in western Pakistan.  None of these coins turn up very often.
    Bahawalpur broke away from the Afghans in the late 18th century and the amirs continued to hold on to their zone through the British period and into Pakistani independence.  There are the usual rupees, not particularly common, and small coppers which developed a tendency toward a relatively thin, squarish shape as the 19th century ground on.  There is always the chance that an odd silver fraction or gold coin might turn up.  The old style hammerred coinage is not all that easy to find.  Machined coppers were struck in the 1940s, one of them, the paisa #Y13, being reasonably common.  Machine struck gold and silver of the 1920s are all rare presentation type stuff.
    Bela in Baluchistan put out a few coppers in the 1850s, not so easily found.  I can’t comment on the coin #Y10.  I’ve never seen one and I’m not even sure its from Bela.  Can you read “Bela” on that coin?
    Kalat, also in Baluchistan, was a British puppet state from 1839 to 1893 when it was dissolved.  There are two copper issues, a scarce dumpy one of the 1820s and another series struck on blanks cut with shears from sheet metal from 1869 through 1879.  I’ve had several people assure me that these latter coins are common, but I’ve only seen a few of them, all one at a time.
    OK, that’s it for the Pakistani native states.  The British struck no coins in Pakistan, at Lahore for instance, until 1943, when they opened a branch mint there to strike rupees, halves and quarters, and those funny little copper pices (quarter annas) with the big center holes.  Not difficult to find most of these Lahore coins.
    Now we come to the present, in which there is an independent Pakistan.  I am trying to think of evenhanded ways to approach the creation of this nation and I think I shall fail and end by possibly annoying or offending some proponents of that country.
    To be brief.  As the Indian Congress Party of Gandhi, etc. gained power and influence from the 1920s, a thought took root amongst a sector of Muslim intellectuals that it would be impossible for Muslims to get a fair shake in an Independent India.  Gandhi, etc. pleaded for unity, but the separatists played a cat and mouse negotiating game which finally resulted in a breakdown and a decision on their part to withdraw from the rest of India on independence.  I have looked at this decision a many times over the years and have been unable to convince myself that it was the result of anything other than fear of retaliation by Hindus for a millennium of mistreatment at the hands of various Muslim governments from the Delhi sultans through the Mughals.
    In any event, the split occurred on Independence Day in 1947, with the migration of several million people across the new borders and the violent deaths of between one and two million of them in anarchic communal violence.  Welcome the modern concept of cultural self-determination.  Twice as many Muslims live (mostly) peacefully in India as are citizens of Pakistan.  Muslims hold high positions in the Indian government and military.  The Hindu population of Pakistan is close to zero.
    Newly independent Pakistan was a wierd two part state separated by a big chunk of India.  A planned election to resolve the status of Kashmir never took place.  Plenty of blame to share for that situation, which has produced a couple of big wars and decades of simmering guerilla activity.  Between the eastern and western halves of Pakistan there developed bad blood as the west corruptly lorded it over the east, extracting money and resources and returning military occupation and repression in exchange.  Things came to a head in 1971, when India helped the east to become independent Bangladesh, after which it left it to fester on its own while Pakistan, reduced to its western portion, nursed its grievances into nuclear weapons.
    A more dangerous situation than that of the current relations between India and Pakistan is difficult to imagine.  Every couple of years they get upset about some little detail and mobilize a couple of million troops on their border.  Then things calm down and they resume cross border bus service and cricket matches.  Then they do it again, nose to nose, shaking their nukes at each other.
    I know what to do!  Let’s talk about the coins!
     There are two sectors in the Pakistan coinage: the circulating stuff and the precious metal commemoratives.  Both sectors have been utterly neglected by collectors outside of Pakistan, and until recently there were essentially no collectors inside the country.  That situation resulted in a general dearth of material in world AND local markets.  Except for the occasional bags of cheap aluminum coins brought out for wholesale coin packets the stuff is not present, and date sets of the large mintage circulating coins are difficult to assemble.
    And then just in the last few years some members of the growing Pakistani middle class have become interested in their coins, and this has further depleted the already spotty market.  The proof sets of 1948 through 1953, formerly disdained by all, have been disappearing back into Pakistan.  Not very many of those anna series coins were preserved in uncirculated.  Pristine specimens in BU can get above catalog values, especially the nickel-brass half annas, which have a tendency to develop spots.  Note that the coin, KM #11, listed in the catalog as a “paisa,” is actually a “pie,” which was a different thing entirely.
    Among the decimal minors, only a very few of the aluminum coins have a wholesale market presence, and they are all 1970s dates.  The stuff from the 1960s is mostly hard to find, and from the 1980s and 90s are basically not around.
    Copper-nickel commemoratives began in 1977, and the only ones I know of having been exported into the market are the Iqbal rupee of 1977 and the Hajj anniversary coins of 1981.
    The precious metal coins, all premium products, were probably all struck at the Royal Mint in England.  The only ones I’ve seen are the 1976 conservation coins and the Jinnah centennial 100 rupees.  When I had these coins they were bought by Pakistanis and went home.  I’ve seen the gold conservation coins advertised here and there, but no others.
    There.  That’s it.  Farewell, Pakistan.