Arabic Coin/Token/Medal?

Welcome Peter,

It looks like a gold mohur from the Bengal Presidency, minted in Murshidabad, India and along the way it has had loops attached to possibly wear as jewellry.

Listed as
KM# 113 12.36 grams 0.917 Gold

It is valuable enough as gold alone, but unfortunately the attached loops remove the numismatic premium it would have carried as a coin alone. Still a gold mohur is a gold mohur. Very good.

Edited - I thought there were two coins but changed the tense to singular.

It's a catalogue reference. "KM" is shorthand for "The Standard Catalog of World Coins" by Krause. It's used to identify the specific type of coin, especially helpful if, as in this case, there are several different coins that are superficially similar. Here is the NGC data page (which uses the data from the Krause catalogue) for your coin, India-Bengal Presidency KM#113.


It does depend on how severe the actual damage to the coin is, but the usual answer is, "a lot of difference". As agandau said, for a relatively common coin such as this, the attached loops effectively destroy it's appeal to a coin collector.


It does depend on the skill of the jeweller who first made it, but the usual answer is "no". The usual method for attaching loops is to sand off part of the surface of the coin where the loop is to be affixed, then solder the loop in place with an alloy not too dissimilar to the alloy the actual coin is made of. The boundary between loop and coin is deliberately blurred during this process, in order to make sure the loop attachment doesn't just fall off again, but in doing so the coin is irrevocably damaged.

The stains on your coin near where the loops are attached tell me these have indeed been soldered on.