Robert Bracey
Robert Bracey has worked on a variety of research projects associated with the British Museum: the Kushan Coins Project; Empires of Faith; and currently Beyond Boundaries. He also works with the collection of South and Central Asian coins.
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Papers by Robert Bracey
The Amirs of Sind issued coins from the early ninth century until they were deposed by Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh. This paper uses the database of finds from the Museums in Rajasthan to explore the distribution of later Amirs of Sind coins. As it shows, ironically, the Amirs coins are primarily known from finds in Rajasthan which over-represent the later Amirs.
This is also the article in which I introduce the concepts of non-planar graphs for establishing the existence of more than two work stations. At the time this was the only three work-station arrangement that had been published predating Carroccio's publication on 'Parallel Striking Reconstruction...' in 2011 and at the time I had not seen the year 3 Herod types studied by Ariel and Fontanille and for which I published a clearer description of the analysis in 2012. The application of graph theory to die studies is still very basic (using only the simplest graph theory concepts) and requires much more detailed working through.
The paper here is not paginated as it is a pdf of the original paper rather than an offprint. Note in Phase III a new type has been published since this article was written (it is noted in the live catalogue but not in the paper).
Errata: On page 127 I go to some trouble to explain the relative positions of Sarghoda (in the north) and Dada Fatehpur (in the south) and that they are linked, respectively to Mint B and Mint A. I then put A in brackets for the northern mint and B for the southern. These should be the other way round.
The paper is not straightforward and the problem needs to be revisited. Another paper was published about the same time which argued for more than three work-stations in a number of Greek mints. The analysis was flawed but the problem of extending the analysis to four work-stations remains (in fact just generalising the analysis)
In this paper I looked at the evidence for Kushan royal patronage (particularly that of the gold coinage) and how that is interpreted. A lot of existing literature sees the gold coinage as reflecting a variety of different religious beliefs which the king's patronised. I argued two-fold that the apparent diversity is a very narrow window, essentially the reigns of Kanishka and Huvishka (and in a recent ONS talk I explained how the greatest diversity belongs to an even narrower period in the reign of Huvishka); and secondly that the pantheon can be seen as much more coherent than it is often given credit for.
This is a big topic, there is a lot here I skim over or don't tackle (such as the identification of the 'archer' on Huvishka's copper). However, I think the thrust of the argument that the coins reflect, often mediated through workers who don't understand, a religious practice that is coherent, and essentially detached from other religious activity in the period.