MUGHAL, Aurangzeb, 1658-1707, silver, rupee, 1070 AH (1658 AD) year 1, Shahjahanabad mint

Description

Shahjahanabad was what they called Delhi back then, after the guy who built the Taj Mahal. Horn silver is a black chloride deposit. If it’s thin enough we call it toning, and may possibly be safely removed. We call it horn silver when it is thick and can’t be removed without leaving a porous spot. Shroff marks are test punches made by merchants in comtemporary markets.

Aurangzeb, says Wikipedia, has been controversial. Pious, orthodox, expansionist, public minded, modest. Also bigoted, intolerant. During his reign his empire was apparently the richest in the world.

A descendant of the Mongol Chingis Khan went adventuring in northern India and carved out a kingdom that became the Mughal (Mongol) Empire. The Mughals at their height controlled India from Afghanistan to Burna, from the Himalayas to the southern tip. They ended up as pensioners of the British, sitting in palaces, doing nothing.

South Asia generally is taken to include India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. Some people would like to include Afghanistan and Burma, but that’s a minority opinion.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.