The numismatic chronicle and journal of the Royal ... - IndianCoins.org

THE COINAGE OF THE MALDIYE ISLANDS. 315The Maldives have been famous from the earliesttimes for their wealth in cowries, and they appear tohare been the sole source of supply of this currency toIndia and Africa. The Arab geographers, Snlaiman 1and Masudi* in the tenth and Idrisi 3in the eleventhcenturies, all note the use of cowries as currency inthese islands*. Masndi and Idrisi give us an accountof how they were obtained. Branches were thrown intothe sea to which the molluscs attached themselves;they were then hauled out and dried in the sun, andwhen clean taken to fill the royal treasury.Ibn Batata,4 the famous Moorish traveller, who spentabout a year and a half in the Maldives between 1344and 1346, gives a similar account of the use of cowries,and adds that 400,000 were worth a dinar of gold. Theywere exported to Bengal and also to Africa, where hehad himself seen them in use at Mali and Juju in theSudan, where they were worth 1150 to the dinar ofgold.Barbosa, 5 an observant Portuguese soldier, who wasin the East early in the sixteenth century, notes thatthere was traffic in cowries between the Maldives andCambay and Bengal, where they were preferred to copperfor sm*ll transactions.Francois Pyrard de Laval, a French sailor, who waswrecked on the Maldives in1602 and kept a prisonerjKTfcsJTafe.UMS.p.S.et de CoorteiDe, La Prairie*