Dr. Shailen Bhandare, "Between Text and Objects: Coinage and the 'Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.'"
Channel: American Numismatic Society
Date: 2019-12-12

In this talk, Dr. Shailen Bhandare discusses the Periplus, a Hellenistic Greek text that provides fascinating details and insights into the trans–Indian Ocean trade in the first century CE. Among its many other gifts, it supplies us with information about the nature and the extent of the role coins played in this enterprise.

This talks highlights and contextualizes the information in the Periplus by providing examples from the numismatic evidence. It will also broadly outline how object exchange across the Indian Ocean facilitated dissemination of art, cultural notions, and technologies across the wider Roman Empire world of East Africa, Arabia, and India.

Dr. Bhandare is Senior Assistant Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. He is also a Fellow of St Cross College and a member of the faculty of Oriental Studies. His curatorial responsibilities cover the coinages of the Indian Subcontinent and the Far East, and Paper Money. Dr. Bhandare is a regular contributor to international conferences and journals; his research interests focus mainly on contextualizing and historicizing Indian coins, with wide ranging topics that include monetary history, art history, iconography and archaeology. Among his recent publications are “Place, Space and Money in Maharashtra, c. 1750–1850: Some Insights,” in Spaces and Places in Western India Formations and Delineations, edited by Bina Sengar and Laurie Hovell McMillin, Routledge India, 2019; and “The Numismatic Chronology of Mathura and its Bearing on Art,” in Indology's Pulse: Arts In Context: Essays Presented to Doris Meth Srinivasan in Admiration of her Scholarly Research, edited By Corinna Wessels-Mevissen and Gerd J.R. Mevissen, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2019.