The Dehli Sultanate came before the Mughal period. And the word should be "billon", not "billion". The Dehli Sultanate was unique among mediaeval societies in issuing a tetrametallic monetary system: gold, fine silver, billon and copper, with coins of fine silver and of billon issued at the same time, almost as if billon was a separate semi-precious metal rather than simply debased silver. This coin is indeed made of billon, not fine-silver; the fine-silver tankas issued by this ruler didn't have the hexagon pattern around the obverse inscription.
Here is an example of a very similar coin on zeno.ru. That one pictured on zeno is the common type, listed in the Goron & Goenka catalogue as number D370. The coin in this thread is a slightly scarcer version, D371, with the word "bin" written to the left of the Sultan's name, rather than beneath it.
D371 is only recorded with two dates, AH 732 and AH 741. I think this is the 741 version, which date would convert to AD 1340-1341.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted 10/31/2012 06:56 am
