Finn's Avatar Gadhaiya - Back With Family For The Holidays

Neat family pic, despite the obvious inbreeding. Sense any die matches in the bunch?

Very nice group Steve!

My favourite is still your avatar coin but I do like the bottom middle coin aswell...Looks like there are some slight variations..head shape,brow of nose angle etc...Great collection!...Paul

Thanks all!

The question which still vexes me the most is why an entire dynasty decided to depict themselves as cone heads on these coins, just like orfew pointed out. As far as I can tell, infant head binding was not practiced in India outside of the brief Alchon occupation.

To answer Bob and Paul, I don't think I have ever seen a die matched pair of these coins. Most have a slightly different sized head, differently angled head, differently angled nose, or differently sized or positioned ribbon. I have heard it suggested that the extreme rarity of die matches indicates a time of political and/or economic instability in which 90-95% of each production batch was melted and recoined a few years later.

Exactly right, KS.

There is however, one twist regarding the shape of the head. It did originate when an engraver confused a coin with worn-out headgear for a coin with a taller head, but the head shrunk to somewhat realistic proportions, then <i>was deliberately elongated, then curved </i> then returned back to more reasonable proportions. The best and most unambiguous evolutionary marker is the degradation of the attendants from a stick figure wearing a herringbone dress into an ordered pile of dots sitting atop two parallel lines.

It is tempting to call this one (1.1.2 Coin 5) the progenitor of my avatar...



But that evolutionary tree ends there. There are no subsequent coins; and the only two I have ever owned were even die matches to each other!

Instead, the gap is closed thus:

1) Stick figure attendant with "Mr potato head" portrait
1.2.1


2) Head becomes a bit more realistic, attendants legs disappear, lower torso becomes a blob with remnants of skirt hem
1.2.2


3) Engravers decide to add a line through the eye dot; brow becomes more prominent, lower part of torso either thins into a line, or disappears and is replaced by a remnant of the hem
1.2.4


4) Head suddenly elongated and curves backward, but the chin is still detached and the nostril and lips are still dots (this is a rare type, Mitchiner 421; not in Deyell or Maheshwari)
1.2.5


The above coin, or one like it, served as the prototype for the rajput king Chittaraja, fl. 1024 AD.

5) Engravers suddenly decide to attach the chin; the nostril becomes a crescent, and the lips become lips, beginning series 1.3


Important to note that the overwhelmingly vast majority of these specimens studied by Maheshwari were from a "pinjar hoard", found in central India and well away from Gujarat.


From there, the head becomes taller, then curves back sharply for the duration of 1.3


That's what gets me--the depiction of the "cone head" portrait comes in a period of careful, deliberate engraving and technological advancement to resolve the striking issues that plagued series 1.1 and 1.2. I do not buy that the elongated head could have been an accident. Maybe a hat, maybe head binding, maybe some cultural something or other that I don't understand...

Anyway, the evolution continues on to series 1.4 (the "Gadhaiya proper" if you will) and the chin again becomes detached, and the head almost instantly shrinks back down:

@Finn235 As I sometimes do, I may have over-explained my point. What I was really getting to is that if we consider the whole head, including the ear and beard, we find a more naturalistic profile.

@AlRashid It is not a genetic trait. In certain Central Asian steppe cultures, including the Attilanic Huns, the crania of high-status infants were artificially deformed by binding as a mark of social rank. The practice is also known elsewhere, e.g. among the Inca of South America.