Page:Indian Shipping, a history of the sea-borne trade and maritime activity of the Indians from the earliest times.djvu/100

 sculpture and painting, there are a few interesting representations on some old Indian coins which point unmistakably to the development of Indian shipping and naval activity. Thus there has been a remarkable find of some Andhra coins on the east coast, belonging to the 2nd and 3rd century A.D., on which is to be detected the device of a two-masted ship, "evidently of large size." With regard to the meaning of the device Mr. Vincent Smith has thus remarked: "Some pieces bearing the figure of a ship suggest the inference that Yajña Śrī's (A.D. 184-213) power was not confined to the land." Again: "The ship-coins, perhaps struck by Yajña Śrī, testify to the existence of a sea-borne trade on the Coromandel coast in the 1st century of the Christian era." This inference is, of course, amply supported by what we know of the history of the Andhras, in whose times, according to R. Sewell, "there was trade both by sea and overland with Western Asia, Greece, Rome, and Egypt, as well as China and the East." In his South Indian Buddhist Antiquities, Alexander Rea gives illustrations and descriptions of three of these ship-coins of the Andhras. They