Tuesday, October 8, 2019

Musical Instruments and Symbols on Coins


The hobby of coin collection is known as Numismatics. It is not only interesting but educative too. A crazy coin collector very easily narrates the culture, religion and history of a country by simply having a look at a coin. A serious numismatist is able to tell us about the country's currency, the denomination and date besides it's size, metallic contents and so on. Thus a coin is packed with a fund of information.

Music being my serious preoccupation I just started collecting coins which have a music motif on it, like musical instruments, lyricists, musicians, stylysed symbols and the like. Here I wish to share with you pictures of some of the recent coins. These are in my album. I have tried to gather the numismatic details too as much as possible.

It is very interesting to note that an image of Samudragupta depicted him as playing a veena like, stringed musical instrument which is best known to the Tamil country as the 'yaazh' (யாழ்). The Greek stringed instrument 'lyre' also has a similarity.

We can claim this coin to be the first one with a music theme. It was minted on pure gold.