indian first coin is 5th century launch by shakya japada

Shakya janapada, Silver 5-shana, c. 5th century BCE

                                                               

Shakya   janapada, Silver 5- shana, c. 5th century BCE

Pentagonal punch plus two banker's marks / Blank

Weight: 6.96 gm., Dim: 24 x 32 mm.

This is a indian first coin is 5th century launch by shakya japada , This is indian History fisrt offical Coin in Documant .

Around 500 BCE, India was divided up into many separate "countries." Buddhist sources identify 16 major janapadas, or tribal territories. Coinage commenced at around this time and two of the earliest janapadas to issue coins were Gandhara, in the north-west (now northern Pakistan), and Shakya, along the India-Nepal borderlands. This coin is an issue of the Shakya janapada. This janapada is of particular interest as it was the birthplace of the Shakya prince Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha. It is quite likely that the Shakya coin comes from approximately the same time and place as the Buddha.

The Shakya coin is an example of a coin type that was invented in India and continued to be used for over 1500 years: the punch-marked coinage. The name reflects the technique of manufacture used. The coin blanks were prepared usually by cutting large sheets of silver, and were then "punched" by one or more small punches that modeled specific designs. We see in the Shakya coin all of these ingredients. The rectangular shape reflects the easy cutting of the coin blank from a larger sheet, the sharp edges betray their origin from the use of a chisel, and the central punch reflects the core design of the coin, here the so-called "pentagonal symbol." 

The violence of the punch is expressed in the protuberance seen on the otherwise blank reverse. Some coins are found with only the one central punch, while others are found with additional punches around the central one. Some of these may have been official punches, and some may have been so-called "banker's marks," punches applied by bankers or money-changers, presumably to record their having assayed the metal content of the coin and found it be of sufficient purity. On this coin, there are two additional punches. One is a simple punch of a pellet and circle, probably a banker's mark, while the other is a complex symbol with a central dot surrounded by six arrowheads arranged radially. This may well have been an official punch, for three reasons: first, it is more complex than the typical banker's marks, second, it appears with some frequency on the Shakya coins, and third, it seems to be a precursor to the so-called "six-arm" symbol that appeared on virtually all the coins of the Magadha-Maurya dynasty of the 4th through 2nd centuries BCE. We will see one such coin a little later .