Qualla: Kabul Hoard

Kabul Hoard: Introduction

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1933, a construction crew digging foundations for a house near the Chaman-i Hazouri park in central Kabul struck something unexpected: roughly one thousand silver coins, along with pieces of jewelry, buried together since approximately 380 BCE. The workers had uncovered what numismatists would come to call the Kabul hoard -- or the Chaman Hazouri hoard -- and it would prove to be one of the most important archaeological finds in South Asian history. Not because the coins were beautiful, though some were, but because they lay together: Greek tetradrachms from Athens and Aegina resting beside Achaemenid sigloi, alongside locally minted round coins and bent silver bars that would rewrite the origin story of Indian coinage.

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Kabul Hoard: Where East Met West in Silver

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Kabul valley sat at the northeastern corner of the Achaemenid Empire, having fallen under Persian rule during the reign of Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BCE. The region -- known by its Iranian name Paruparaesanna and its Indian name Gandara -- was administered first fr...

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Kabul Hoard: The Birth of Indian Money

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What made the hoard transformative was not the Greek coins alone but what they were found alongside. The deposit included locally minted round coins that showed a striking evolution: the oldest bore animal motifs echoing the designs of Croesus of Lydia -- facing busts of two bull...

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Kabul Hoard: A Museum Emptied

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Of the roughly one thousand coins unearthed in 1933, 127 coins and pieces of jewelry were taken to the Kabul Museum; others dispersed to museums across British India and beyond. For decades, they sat in Kabul, studied and photographed by French archaeologist Daniel Schlumberger o...

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Kabul Hoard: What the Coins Still Say

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Even in their absence, the Kabul hoard continues to shape scholarship. The deposit date of approximately 380 BCE -- established by the most recent datable coin, an imitation of an Athenian owl tetradrachm -- provides one of the rare fixed points for dating Indian punch-marked coi...

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