That would imply that materials are significantly more expensive than labour. If labour were more expensive, it would have been cheaper to make simpler designs. Quite possible, but it doesn't solve my problem.
What I am after is a more complicated question. Why do labour cost (for making the die) not count when it comes to the glory of the Mughal while material cost, while they do count when it comes to rolling the plates to thickness and material cost for heating count? In other words, what's the point of making beautiful dies to make ugly coins?
Maybe, just maybe the Mughal was so far removed from reality that he didn't know what real coins looked like because he only saw broad flans?
Peter
In the times of the early Mughals, this was not the case. One finds reasonably large flans most of the time, and the possible reasons for the sometimes poor strikes was likely the need of speed.
As times went by the beauty of the coins reduced, (from the times of Aurangzeb, we see plain coins) and then as years progressed and th hold of the Delhi court loosened, the coins too keep pace with the deterioration. As the power moved from the Mughal court to the governors and then to the small time princes, the workmanship of the coins, the die engraving etc kept sliding.............. till it came to a state that the coins show just a fraction of the die.
The possible reason was that while the coins in the initial stage were a marketing medium to propagate the cause of the Mughal Rulers, Aurangzeb introduced the Islamic tradition of artless, beauty-less coins. Later on, as the engraving skills deteriorated, the dies kept becoming larger and the flans, to save cost, became smaller. Even alloy was altered to reduce the silver percentage (by small fractions).
Amit
