A transferred touch
Coins, holes and the magic of connection
The times, they are a bit strange! I’m back in the UK, writing this on general election day. (Actually exiting India turned out to be a bit of an adventure, resolved through further help from friends and some very kind gentlemen in administrative positions, but I am home and doing fine.)
The future, it is a bit uncertain, but I’m excited by the possibilities.
The past and the present? I find myself, frankly, rather re-enchanted by both! I guess there is nothing like a radical shake-up of the norm to make you look again at the world around you. Currently, I find myself grinning at everyday things and excitedly reading about history in a way that has been difficult to find in recent years.
Watch a man’s hands and you watch his heart
In this rather delighted state, I recently began reading a fantasy/sci-fi novel that, at around 50 pages in, I’m enjoying very much. One of its main (albeit deceased) characters is a historian and its world building not only respects but really centres the past as fundamental to how people live in their worlds and imagine their futures. No lazy ‘mystical sage tells ancient legend of her people on page 514, which coincidentally reveals how to use mysterious ancient artefact that heroic 19-year-old protagonist must finally use to save the world’: City of Stairs is about history as something contested and complex, something that makes the worlds that create it.
It also contains this passage, about said deceased historian (don’t worry - this isn’t a spoiler. The dead historian is actually mentioned in the blurb), which made instant and total sense to me:
‘…Efrem was always fascinated by what people did with their hands: It is how people interact with the world, he told her once. The soul might be within the eyes, but the subconscious, the matter of their behaviour, that is in the hands. Watch a man’s hands and you watch his heart. And perhaps he was right, for Efrem was always touching things when he encountered some new discovery: he stroked table tops, tapped on walls, kneaded up dirt, caressed ripe fruit.’
Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs, 2014, Jo Fletcher Books, p. 42
Touch and the past is certainly not something that Robert Jackson Bennett is the first to write about. Another historian friend of mine told me years ago that she was struck by D. H. Lawrence writing about ‘transferred touch’, or the sense that, by touching something old you can almost feel those who have touched it before. I’m sure there are many other examples.
This passage, though, caught me right in the solar plexus because I do all of those things - stroking tables, kneading dirt, caressing fruit. At times I’ve worried that it makes me look compulsive (I am and it probably does) or nervous or just plain weird.
When I was at school (a lovely Edwardian building, opened in 1911), I would run my fingertips along the chestnut-coloured tiles that cover the corridor walls from floor to shoulder height and for a moment feel that I could sense some other girl who had passed that way before.
At a restaurant in Fort William a couple of years ago, our waiter was concerned when I picked up the container on the table for holding knives and forks to examine the bottom. ‘Isn’t it clean or something?’ he asked nervously. ‘Oh,’ said I, embarrassed at being caught out being weird, ‘I don’t know. I wanted to know whether it was cast or hammered.’ I love wood and stone and the imprint of moveable type in old printed books. And that sense of touch is so powerful with coins: objects designed to move from hand to hand, things sitting in museums or collections that carry the physical traces of centuries of touch.
Last week I introduced, very briefly, Roman and late Roman/Byzantine coins found in South Asia, which were the focus of my PhD research. A lot more of that work than I planned ended up being about touch, attachment, interaction and the shadows of human action, preserved in objects.
In part, this was because what I had originally thought my project would be about turned out not to be viable. There are not enough late Roman/Byzantine coins in South Asia to do the kind of ‘how much trade, when and where?’ study that, back in 2009, I thought was what you did with coin finds. And anyway, I’d already started to be influenced by studies pointing out that those are really quite difficult questions to answer even when you have a lot of coins to play with.
Being led by the evidence, though, is invariably more exciting than anything you think you’re going to find when you set out. So it has proved.
This week I want to talk to you about just one tiny journey those coins took me on - one so insignificant that many early reports about coin finds didn’t even mention it, or did so only in passing.
Holes in coins
A whole post about holes in coins? Surely not!
Actually, no. There’s far too much about holes in coins to cover in just one post.
Holes in late Roman/Byzantine coins and their imitations found in South Asia? Manageable.
First of all, holes in these coins are pretty easy to summarise, because they are always the same. They are in the same position, made the same way, roughly the same distance apart and of the same number. Specifically, two holes, made right above the imperial portrait, roughly a half centimetre, or slightly less, apart, and punched through the coin, likely using a hammer and nail or something similar, from the front to the back (or, in numismatic terms, from the obverse, or ‘heads’ side, to the reverse or ‘tails’ side).
Look at how the metal is pressed inwards on the side of the coin with the portrait and bulges outwards on the other side, showing which way the hole was made and that it was not drilled through. The placing of the holes is consistent. It has been done to around 1/3 of the late Roman/Byzantine coins found in South Asia that I have seen and I have never seen an example of one of these coins with a different number of holes or holes in different places. This was both a unique and personal interaction that somebody had with each of these coins and, at the same time, a shared practice - a fashion.
Lest you think, at this point, that I’m overblowing something obvious here (where else would you pierce a coin? That is just how anybody would do it..!), this pattern is highly unusual for both its specific details and for its consistency. Roman coins found in South Asia (from the 1st and second centuries CE), for example, which probably travelled there only a century or so earlier than the examples I’m looking at, do not have these consistent double piercings.
A few do, but the majority, if they are pierced, have one hole, usually, but not always, above the portrait, or sometimes even a hole in the middle of the coin, in front of or behind the imperial image, and re-filled with a gold plug.1 Some are not pierced, but have a gold frame attached with a loop or tube, which could be used to thread a strong through.
The late Roman/Byzantine examples, which date from the fourth century onwards, were therefore part of a longer-term fashion for displaying coins by hanging them as pendants, but exactly how you were meant to do that changed over time and became more consistent. These late Roman coins also, as we saw last week, also arrived in a smaller area of South Asia, so we may also be looking at regional differences in style as well as change over time.
The strict focus on the imperial portrait is also not as common as you might imagine. One thing that I noticed as part of my PhD research and have been paying attention to ever since is that when coins are pierced in the areas where they are used as everyday currency, people tend to pay much less attention to where they put the hole in relation to the design.
Familiarity, as the saying goes, breeds contempt, and apparently, if we know what a coin is meant to look like, we don’t really pay much attention to the details. A coin worn as a pendant in a place where that coin is used might have all sorts of meanings: good luck, protection from the evil eye, displaying wealth, but it isn’t about showing off the images on the coin, because everybody knows what they are. Thus, from the coins in South Asia we can also see a different kind of interaction, by people who were not familiar with these coins and therefore did pay attention to their details and cared more about some parts of the design more than others.
Although these coins were evidently valued, though, and probably worn, they were not everyday items, either in the sense of being common or being worn every day.
Each genuine late Roman/Byzantine gold coin found in South Asia, and most of the more accurate imitations was also a 4.5g. lump of pretty much pure gold. At current gold prices in the UK, that is about £270. We have no idea how much it would have been worth in 4th-6th-century South Asia, or how much added value being in the shape of a late Roman coins would have given it (but some, or why imitate them?), but we do know that gold was highly prized. So, by virtue of pure economic value, they would not have been common items. They are also found in fairly small numbers (around 400-500 specimens have been recorded so far).
However, even among the small elite which likely had exclusive access to them, they were also not ‘everyday’ objects. How can we tell? Look back at those pictures: the coins look almost pristine. The designs are sharp and clear, the raised areas, especially the portrait itself, still show details like eyes and strands of hair. So do the designs on the reverse, which would have been rubbing against skin or clothing while the coin was being worn.
Pure gold is soft. If these were everyday objects for the very rich people who could have owned them, if they were passed down from generation to generation as things like wedding rings often are in the west today, they would show signs of that. None of them do. These were objects either kept for special occasions, or perhaps only worn for a short time (years or decades, but not several lifetimes) before going out of style.
Beauty, touch and superstition
There are so many tantalising things about these coins that we either don’t know (yet) or can’t ever know. Nobody in first-millennium peninsular South Asia ever wrote about what they thought of Roman or late Roman coins, or indeed, coins in general as jewellery or decorative objects. In fact, writing about coins at all is pretty rare in the ancient world. And there is also something about that, which is deeply relatable, human and enticing.
Historians, conventionally, deal with things that are written down, but how much of our lives are never put down in words? Even today, when photography is so ubiquitous, how many things that are precious and real and important to who we are and how we work in the world are never recorded or explained, maybe even to ourselves?
Thinking about the tiny, specific, technical steps made to pierce and hang a coin opens up a tiny route into some of that in lives lived long ago, but in which pure gold would still have felt just a bit like butter on the fingers and in which, if the number of coins pierced, put into jewellery, left in graves or rivers or churches and temples all over the world are anything to go by, money has always meant more than something to buy and sell with.
That might be a few more posts, but strictly, isn’t about holes, so I’ll live it here.
Except to add that, just before I left for India, a mysterious parcel arrived in the post. It was from my best friend.
Traditionally, in the UK, a silver sixpence brings good luck. It took me a little while to figure out how to wear it: I wanted it to be secure so I didn’t lose it, but it didn’t really work for me as a necklace. I thought about those coins in India with their double piercings and a way that an archaeologist at an online conference during Covid told me that people among the Adivasi (the indigenous people of the hill regions of much of South Asia) in peninsular South Asia still wear coins with two holes, with a single string threaded through both holes. It works surprisingly well using two of the holes in the frame on my little silver sixpence, too.
And thinking about what this coin means to me - luck, hope, friendship, a new part of the way I look, recognition of an old obsession, a live cultural artefact and a defunct economic one - I can see how much we will never really know about what any particular object meant to another person. I also know that somebody in ancient South Asia would understand, seeing my sixpence, all the things it might mean, as I do looking at theirs, and I feel closer to them.
There is some great recent work on this specific phenomenon: Smagur, Emilia, ‘Regulated Roman Coins and Their Imitations from India: Did Roman Coins Circulate as Money in the Subcontinent?’, Notae Numismaticae / Zapiski Numizmatyczne, 15 (2020), pp. 179–210.
The coins are something of value to the people of South Asia who used them. Our eternal concern as human beings: How does one find something of value?