The military occupation of India by the Huns, or Hūṇas, lasted but
thirty years. By A.D. 500 Toramāṇa, leader of the tribe known as the
White Huns or Ephthalites, had established himself in Mālwā. On his
death, two years later, his successor, Mihiragula, completed the
conquest of Northern India, fixing his capital at Śākala (Siālkōt)
in the Panjāb, but was driven out by a confederacy of Hindu princes
under the leadership of Yasodharman of Mālwā in A.D. 528. He thereupon
seized the kingdom of Kashmīr, where he ruled till his death in 542.
Probably there were other Hūṇa chiefs who struck coins in India, but
the legends on their coins are so fragmentary that their names have not
as yet been satisfactorily deciphered. On some of the earliest Hūṇa
imitations of Sassanian silver coins, for example, the legend _Shāhī
Javūvlah_ appears, but whether this is the name of a king or merely a
title is uncertain. No Hūṇa coins show any originality of design. The
majority are either imitated from or restruck upon Sassanian silver
pieces. The heads of both Toramāṇa and Mihiragula (Pl. VI, 4) on the
obverse are coarse and brutal to the last degree; on the reverse appear
the usual Sassanian fire-altar and attendants; the inscriptions are
generally in Nāgarī script. Toramāṇa also copied the silver coinage
of the Maukharīs (Pl. VI, 7). The copper of both princes show traces
of Sassanian and Gupta influence; the reverses especially recall the
fabric of Chandragupta II’s copper issues. Kushāṇa copper was imitated
by Mihiragula, probably during his reign in Kashmīr.
Although the Huns were mainly instrumental in introducing Sassanian
types into India, it seems certain that shortly after their invasion a
Sassanian dynasty, or a dynasty acknowledging the suzerainty of Persia,
was established in Western India; for coins with bilingual inscriptions
in Pahlavī and Nāgarī have been found, directly imitated from Sassanian
issues. One of these bears the name Shāhī Tigin, and the Nāgarī legend
reads, “_King of India and Persia_.” Another class with the name
Vāsudeva is directly copied from a type of the coinage of the Sassanian
Khusrū Parvīz struck in 627; but the best known and the most finely
executed are the flat copper and silver pieces (Pl. VI, 5) which bear
the name _Napkī Malik_; but whether this prince was a Persian or a Hun
is doubtful.
These Sassanian coins were the prototypes of degenerate base silver
pieces which are found in large quantities throughout Rājputāna, and
must have served as currency for the early Rājpūt states there for
centuries. At first they preserve the thin flat fabric of their models
(Pl. VI, 6), but as the head on the obverse and the fire-altar on the
reverse become more debased they grow thicker and more dumpy. The
curious coins known as _Gadhiya Paisa_ (Pl. VI, 8), which circulated
in the same districts and also in Gujarāt, probably down to a later
period, also show traces of a Sassanian origin. The silver coins
with the legend _Śrīmad Ādivarāha_ on the reverse, and Vishṇu in his
boar avatar (Varāha) as the type of the obverse, retain traces of a
fire-altar below the inscription. These have been attributed to the
powerful Bhoja-deva of Kanauj (840-890), whose family, Gurjara in
origin, had formerly ruled in south Rājputāna. Very similar in fabric
are those inscribed _Śrī Vigraha_, assigned to Vigrahapāla I, circ.
A.D. 910, of the Bengal Pāla dynasty.
All these debased coins follow the weight standard of their Sassanian
originals, which represented the Attic drachma of 67·5 grains, and in
inscriptions they are actually called “_drammas_.”