'Coin\r'

'I was natural in the fires of an old-fashioned organise in the hilss of the Hindu Kush. Amid the clatter of shafts and the clack of classical, I paused on a beat-up anvil for the final pangs of my creation. Beneath me recumb a hardened die complaint the image of my faggot; atop me press other, sculpted with horsemen and few mirror-image linguistic communication. Then the hammer struck, hard and heavy, ringing out the watchword of my nativity. With each belo the dies dug deeper into my flesh, stamping their images as representing father and mother of a freshly create from raw materialed coin.As I look subscribe across two millennia for these earliest memories, I marbel at my abundant, today mythary, journey from mine to mint to merchandise to museum. I remeber Rome as a rising power, a century sooner the first Caesars; I recall the archean days of Emperor Asokas moral conquests and the builing of Chinas broad Wall. I have outlived six of the s hitherto won ders of the ancient world. (I am told the coarse gain lighten stands) Yet I am no mute ruin: silver babble outs. Mine is the voice of history, recorded by numismatists trained to hear my ancient stories of art, industry, worship, and war.My blandness youth, when legends traced my origins to a colony of teras ants. most(prenominal) lucky in ancient propagation was mined by condemned criminals and slaves whose lives meant little to their taskmasters. In my days, the mines of Egypt were legendary hives of human misery. entirely it was state that luxurious in great abundance could be ground just India, where giant ants piled luxurious-bearing dust at the entrances of their tunnels. These antsâ€nearly the size of it of dogs, the legend saidâ€defended their burrows fiercely against men who dargond to steal the spoils of their digging. notwithstanding much(prenominal)(prenominal) danger was trivial give the convening costs of ancient mining, and so the legend sp read as off the beaten track(predicate) as Greece. When horse parsley the Great invaded the Indus Valley in the fourth century BC, his classic soldiers eagerly searched for this legendary lode. Local guides disp rangeed for them the dappled skins of the ants themselves, but the invaders could not find a atomic number 53 mound of precious gold wholly a few generations later, however, classic settlers were collection large quantities of gold in this rattling division.These descendants of Alexanders warriors created a wealthy tycoondom called Bactria, famous for its beautiful silver and gold coins like me. (See Aramco World, May/June 1994) Where, scholars have yen wondered, did the classical kings of Bactria find so much precious surface? International clientele constitutes one obvious source, but giant â€Å"ants” might be some other. Two thou years by and by I was born, explorers observed that burrowing marmots on the remote Dansar Plateau, near the borders of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China, do indeed heap mounds of gold-bearing universe at the mouths of their burrows.These stocky rodents, called â€Å"mountain ants” by the Persians who passed the legend on to the Greeks, grow to the size of small dogs and pitch up meter- highschool hills of metal(prenominal) subsoil. Even in modern times, local tribes harvest this gold in an antique tradition that recalls the legends of my youth. It is possible, after all, that inhuman marmots, rather than inhuman misery, brought my gold to the forges of man. From the moment I left the royal mint of my king Eucratides, eager hands grasped for me. I was a beauty then, the envy of all monarch butterfly and merchant from the Indus to the Euphrates.Great artists had carved my parent dies in mirror-image, etching tiny Greek nomenclature and figures backward so that these negative forms would modernize positive impressions on my two faces. The result, when compressed into 8. 5 grams ( 0. 3 oz) of gold, is a superb coin called a stater — a detect of art as well as riches. My obserse (the â€Å"heads” face produced by the lower, anvil die) boasts a once-brilliant portrait of King Eucratides, framed in a circle of small dots. screwing the kings neck trails the royal diadem, a thread tied round his head as the unmistakble emblem of his office.His cloak, engraved in high relief, is that of a cavalry commander, and his great cap helmet resembles a Boeotian design lauded by the historian Xenophon as the best headgear for cavalrymen. Attached to my kings helmet is a frontlet that sweeps back and ends in bulls horns and ears. well-nigh consider this a symbolic evocation of Alexander the Greats war-horse Bucephalus (â€Å"Ox-head”), who had horns gibe to most accounts, and who had been buried by Alexander near my throw birthplace. Like Alexander, my king rode with valor at the head of his elect cavalry and conquered with an aggressive Greek spirit.In fact, Eucratides called himself â€Å"the Great” long before that statute title was given to Alexander by the Romans. On my check (the â€Å"tails” side produced by the upper, plug forward die), you burn d sustain still read the wonderful caption â€Å"King Eucratides the Great. ” No Greek had ever put such words on his coinage before, but substitute was never my kings vogue. The armed horsemen who gallop within the inscription are Castor and Pollux. In Greek mythology, they were the sons of Zeus who would suddenly bug out in a crisis to save the day, much like Eucratides himself, who wrestled the Bactrian throne from a disinclination dynasty.These twins carry palms, brandish spears, and discover felt caps topped with stars. Behind the female genitals legs of the trailing horse, you rout out discern a Greek monogram, W. This mark identifies either the mint or the magistrate responsible for my creation. Nearly every gold and silver coin mi nted in Bactria carries such a birthmark, but the take away meaning of the many symbols has long been mixed-up. For example, some scholars think that my monogram indicates the city of Balkh or Aornus; others see entirely the initials of some un cognise Greek official who served a few months as midwife in the delivery of my kings unfermented money.If you look past the scars of my long life, I am as beautifully Greek as the Parthenon itself, though I was born 5000 kilometers (3000 mi) east of Athens. I am the principal of the West imprinted on the precious metal of the East. The implications haunt me. Am I propaganda etched on plunder, or the product of a peaceful integration? Do I personify apartheid or a confederation? The design and distribution of currency are deliberate, official acts, so money can never be neutral in the essays of any society.Look at a nations coins and you testament see the scatter-shot of its cultural canon: even a melting-pot like America has a partis an coinage, its message overwhelmingly white, male, European, and Christian. In ancient Bactria, I was no little biased. My milieu is entirely Mediterranean, and my intrinsic protect kept me beyond reach of the marginalized execrable of the non-Greek population. Gold circulated over the heads of these farmers and servants, who relied upon small denominations of dye of silver for their meager purchases.My king minted for them some square, multilingual issues struck on an Indian weight beat, but I belonged to compound Greek aristocrats, the ruling elite of Bactria. impertinent small bronze and silver coins which act swiftly but never far, my gold brothers and I ranged into territories quite distant from our monarchs own marketplaces. Throughout the Middle East, Hellenistic states were ready to accept gold coins struck on a common Greek standard with recognizable types. I, for example, would be pull ind in any market from the Balkans to Bactria.I had no repressive local fea tures, as did my square bilingual cousins, and my denomination conformed to the Attic Greek form used nearly everywhere in Alexanders old empire. The range of my travels can be easily documented: In Mesopotamia, for example, another Greek king so prise my design that he shamelessly steal every detail for his own coinage. But globe-trotting gold cannot be too careful, for everywhere, unsatisfiable melting pots stand ready. My parent dies produced as many as 20,000 siblings identical to me; at a time, of them all, only I have survived the gauntlet that gold runs.The most critical moment in any moneys life is the day it ceases to be currency. Once a coin can no longer circulate in a given place or time, human hands are fast(a) to convert it into some more effectual form. Most of my brothers became bullion again, their identities soon lost in the issues of other, less ancient kings. just about may exist still as a statues thumb or a goblets lip, but I would not recognize them. I carry the last known imprint of our shared dies because an odd concomitant spared my life. Painful and defacing though it was, that occasion added 2000 years to my story and gave me an unexpected career.A sturdy eyelet of my metal was fused to my reverse side, honorable across my galloping horsemen. The attachment was sized to qualified a finger, and I became a sinet ring. This ancient operation changed the whole pattern of my life. My surfaces no longer wore evenly; instead my obverse suffered horribly as it rode that band exposed to occasional bumps and bruises, while my reverse design was now shielded from the whold. I lived a exotic saucy life on the price side of the humand hand, banished from the palm where coins enjoy the camaraderie of active currency. Who had done this to me?The Greeks, as far as I could determine, were gone. Shortly after my kings reign, Bactria fell to successive waves of nomadic invaders. Some of them later settled in the region and created the Kushan empire, astride the famous Silk Roads that connect the empires of Rome and China. One Kushan ruler so exceeded my own kings ambitions that he proclaimed himself not only â€Å"the Great”, but alike â€Å"King of Kings, Son of Heaven, Caesar” — a title that is simultaneously Iranian, Indian, Chinese, and Roman. Although I finally found myself outside the closed world of my Greek makers, I felt welcome among these discriminating Kushans.They borrowed freely from my past. One of their graves contained a magnificent cameo imitating my design, and signet rings of Greek style were common elements in their elaborate gold-spangled costumes. at long last lost or interred — I cannot recall which — I reluctantly returned down the stairs the soil of Central Asia. For twenty centuries I slept; you cannot imagine the burden of time. My gold kept its luster while all around me the corrosive poisons of earth ate away the baser metals. Above me, kings gav e way to caliphs and khans as new realms dawned and died.Other gold shone for the civilizations of Muslims, Mongols, and Mughals while I lay undiscovered, underground, my fame forgotten. Neither man or marmot bring through me — until modern times. Then, I suddenly awoke and saw myself reflected in the wide dark eyeball of a jubilant discoverer. My new protector considered the expedient of the melting pot, but my unusual appearance gave him pause. Not just another antique coin, I was a warriors signet, well-suited to his own station. He was an Afghan officer, and I found a new home on his hand. There I was schooled in the long history I had missed.I learned that Bactria had pop off Afghanistan, where the weapons were new but the wars unchanged. Great powers still converged upon this rugged and remote bastion in order to control the gateways between Europe, Asia and India. Now, however, this struggle was called â€Å"the Great Game. ” Intrepid spies from czarist Russ ia and over-embellished Britain crept along the snow-filled passes of Central Asia, and tired armies clashed in places called Kabul, Kandahar and the Khyber Pass. Rudyard Kipling and others romanticized the struggle, but brave men did not bleed the less for all this talk of games. I saw the fight firsthand\r\n'