Coins, trade routes, cities and guilds

Detail

Punch-marked coins — the first Indian money

• Punch-marked coins are the first coins made in India. They are called "punch-marked" because of how they were made: each symbol was struck on the metal with a separate punch (a small metal stamp) [2].
• Metal: mainly silver. Silver is a soft metal, so symbols press into it easily. Copper was also used. Later coins used copper, gold and other metals.
• Date: from about the sixth century BCE onwards (NCERT). The RBI dates the whole series from the 7th–6th century BCE to the 1st century CE [2].
• Symbols punched on them: the sun, various animal designs, trees, hills, and plain geometrical shapes [2]. Many coins carry five such marks.
• Shape: mostly small silver pieces; an early related type is the silver "bent bar" [2]. Punch-marked silver coins were often square and are dated by the RBI museum to the 5th–4th century BCE for common use [2].
• Who issued them?
• Generally, each mahajanapada issued its own coins.
• But coins did not stay at home — they travelled across regions and into trade far beyond the issuing state.
• Scholars try to match the symbols to ruling families, which suggests kings issued them. But merchants, bankers and townspeople may also have issued some.
• The RBI divides the series into two phases: a first period linked to the janapadas (small local states) and a second period linked to the Mauryan empire; it says the coins were issued first by merchant guilds and later by states [2].

Note: the RBI's "issued initially by merchant Guilds and later by States" puts merchants first in time. NCERT keeps both open — kings and merchants/bankers/townspeople may have issued coins. Follow NCERT in the exam. [2]

• Numismatists (people who study coins) use these finds — recovered all over the subcontinent — to rebuild the old commercial networks. Where a coin is found tells us where trade reached.
• Denomination term: the karshapana (also called pana) was a standard silver coin of early India, weighing about 57.8 grains ≈ 3.75 grams [4].
• A large hoard site studied in detail is Taxila, whose punch-marked coins have their own published catalogue [3].

Trade routes — the two great arteries

• Two main long-distance routes opened in this millennium.
• Uttarapatha ("northern road"):
• Joins the northwest to the Ganga plains, and then on to eastern India.
• The route ran from beyond Taxila in the northwest all the way to Tamralipti, the port on the eastern coast [5].
• Its users were not only traders — peddlers, caravan leaders, religious teachers and princes all moved along it [5].

• This same alignment later became the Grand Trunk Road (also called Badshahi Sadak / Sadak-e-Azam), now on India's UNESCO Tentative List [6].

• Dakshinapatha ("southern road"):

• Starts from Kaushambi (near modern Prayagraj) and crosses the Vindhyas to go south.
• Buddhist texts record merchants going from Pataliputra and Kaushambi to Pratishthana on the Godavari river [5].

• Ashoka used this road when sent by Bindusara from Pataliputra to Ujjayini in Malwa; Ashokan edicts were set up along both routes [5].

• Lateral (side) roads joined these two main lines to the ports on both coasts — east and west. So a bale of goods could move road → road → ship.

• Later successive dynasties maintained and expanded both routes — they were state assets, not just merchant tracks.

Cities sit on routes

• Rule of thumb: almost every major early town lay on a route of communication. A city without a route had no reason to exist.
• Pataliputra — on riverine routes (the Ganga and its feeder rivers).
• Ujjayini — on land routes.
• Puhar — near the coast, at the point where sea routes began.

• Mathura — a busy commercial, cultural and political centre all at once.

• Why we know less about these cities than about Harappan cities: people still live in them today. You cannot dig up a modern, inhabited town, so extensive excavation is difficult. Harappan sites were abandoned, so archaeologists could open them fully.

• Ancient Pataliputra has been partly excavated and reported by the ASI, and the route towns are documented in older ASI-linked studies [7].

The people of the towns

• From the 2nd century BCE, short votive inscriptions (small donation records carved at religious sites) begin to name donors — and often their job.
• Occupations named include: washing folk, weavers, scribes, carpenters, potters, goldsmiths, blacksmiths, officials, religious teachers, merchants and kings.
• Why this matters: it is the first time ordinary urban working people speak in the record with their own names.

Guilds — the shrenis

• Shreni = an organisation of craft producers and merchants. Members of one trade grouped together.
• What a shreni probably did (NCERT):
• procured raw materials — bought in bulk for all members,
• regulated production — decided how work was done,

• marketed the finished products — sold on behalf of members.

• Wider picture from later literature:

• The Jataka literature refers to eighteen types of guilds.
• Guilds regulated quality of goods.
• They often fixed prices.
• They disciplined members through guild courts — their own internal justice.

• They worked as banks, financiers and trustees — taking deposits, lending money, and holding donated funds on trust.

• Members of a guild often lived in one part of a town, so trades clustered by street [4].

• Guilds were registered with the town authorities, followed their own code called shreni-dharma, and had their own seals and insignia (stamps and badges) [4].
• Rich guilds donated generously to Buddhist and Jain monasteries — some of the finest early Buddhist monuments were paid for this way [4].
• Jataka stories also remember overseas trade with Baveru (usually read as Babylon), showing how far the merchant world reached [4].

Prelims Hooks

• Punch-marked coins were made mostly of silver (also copper); symbols were struck with a separate punch for each mark [2].
• Common punch-mark symbols: sun, animals, trees, hills, geometrical shapes [2].
• RBI dates punch-marked coinage from the 7th–6th century BCE to the 1st century CE; NCERT dates the start to the sixth century BCE [2].
• The karshapana (pana) weighed about 57.8 grains / 3.75 grams of silver [4].
• Uttarapatha ran from beyond Taxila in the northwest to the eastern port of Tamralipti [5].
• Dakshinapatha started at Kaushambi, crossed the Vindhyas, and reached Pratishthana on the Godavari [5].
• Route-and-city pairings: Pataliputra = river routes; Ujjayini = land routes; Puhar = sea routes; Mathura = commerce + culture + politics.
• Jataka literature names eighteen types of guilds; guilds had guild courts and acted as banks and trustees.
• Guilds were registered with town authorities, followed shreni-dharma, and used their own seals [4].
• Votive inscriptions from the 2nd century BCE are the first records naming urban occupations.
• Scholars who study coins are called numismatists; early historic cities are hard to excavate because people still live on them.

Mains Points

• Coins are evidence, not just currency. Because punch-marked coins of one mahajanapada turn up far outside it, they prove that exchange crossed political borders long before any empire unified the region. The possible role of merchants, bankers and townspeople as issuers also shows that economic power was not a royal monopoly — useful for any question on state formation versus commercial society in the Second Urbanisation.
• Routes made cities, and cities made states. Uttarapatha and Dakshinapatha explain where the mahajanapada capitals grew. Pataliputra, Kaushambi, Ujjayini and Mathura all stand on nodes. Later dynasties maintained these roads and Ashoka placed edicts along them [5] — showing that control of routes was a tool of political control, and that the same corridor survived into the Grand Trunk Road [6].
• The shreni as a proto-institution. A body that fixed prices, judged its own members in guild courts, held deposits as a bank, and carried a registered seal is doing work we would now split between a chamber of commerce, a court and a bank [4]. This weakens the picture of an early Indian state that controlled everything, and supports the idea of shared authority between king and corporate bodies.
• Limits of our evidence. Two gaps must be stated in any answer: the votive inscriptions start only in the 2nd century BCE, after the period, so the occupational picture is read backwards; and the great cities cannot be fully excavated because they are still lived in. Our picture of the Second Urbanisation is therefore built more from coins, texts and route geography than from complete city plans — the opposite of the Harappan case.