A COMPULSIVE COLLECTOR: COIN HOARDS IN IRAN AND PAKISTAN

Bruce Smith writes:

Fifty Years Around the Third World: Adventures and Reflections of an Overseas American, by Haldore Hanson. Fraser Publishing Company, Burlington, Vermont 1986. ISBN 0870340808 (paperback) 0870340816 (hardcover).

My favorite diversion during four years in west Africa was collecting tribal art, especially wood carvings. And in south Asia my passion was ancient coins. ……. In the Iranian Khuzestan, as mentioned earlier, our land-leveling machines inadvertently tore open ancient graves that contained relics, including clay pots of coins.

Most coins were Elamite --- 2,000 to 2,500 years old, a quarter inch in diameter, usually depicting a bewhiskered Elamite king with a star and crescent over his crown. No one else in our organization was interested in coins, so our laborers gladly accepted from me a few modern rials for each handful of old coppers. In two years I collected 3,000 specimens.

Later in Tehran, I found jewelry shops with silver coins of Alexander the Great --- the drachma, size of an American dime, and the tetradrachma, the size of an American half dollar. (Alexander lived from 356 to 323 BC). Tehrani jewelers melted down these Alexandrians to make modern jewelry for Iranian women, so it was possible to buy coins by the ounce for the current price of silver bullion. I bought about 100 silver pieces at prices that ranged from US 10 cents to US $1.00 each. Their true value has no doubt by now been discovered.

In Pakistan my coin collecting was again stimulated when I visited Taxila. Taxila is an old capital of Alexander the Great, located about 20 miles northwest of modern Islamabad. It is now a ruin of foundations a quarter mile square, located on a slight rise. There is a small museum there, but something more important to me -- farmers who till the surrounding fields constantly discover coins in the soil. If a visitor were to stand for a few minutes on the front steps of this ancient site, a farmer would walk from the fields, draw from his pocket a folded rag and display a small collection of ancient coins, usually a mixture of silver and copper. I never saw a gold coin here although gold coins existed in Alexander's day.

In Pakistan jewelry stores at Peshawar and Lahore, I found collections of Alexandrian drachma, all green with patina and looking truly ancient. But when I cleaned some of them with acid, I discovered they were reproductions, cast by the same jewelers who sold them. I asked one jeweler how he produced the green oxidation. Easy, he said. He had pushed the dime-sized coin down the throat of a chicken; when the coin came out with the droppings, the acid of the intestinal tract had caused the green color.

On my last visit to Taxila -- just before the end of my Pakistan assignment -- a village boy showed me some exciting silver coins, and I offered to buy them all. Then it occurred to me to ask if he had others. Yes, he said, he had a hoard at his home. We drove to his village a few miles distant, and there he produced a lump of coins, the size of a grapefruit, mostly coppers stuck together.

We had no time to break them apart and count them because my plane was about to depart from Rawalpindi. How much did he want? He said 10,000 rupees, which was probably the largest sum he could imagine. I gave him a one thousand rupee note (US $140), and he jumped with joy. That hoard still sits in a closet drawer awaiting my retirement and an appraisal of their value. I don't think they are fakes, but they may be.

Bruce adds:

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web