Indian History GK Questions with Answers – Page 17

Aurei (singular aureus) were the gold coins of the Roman Empire, and large numbers of them reached India in payment for Indian goods.

The remark comes from Abbé Jean-Antoine Dubois, a French Catholic missionary who lived in south India, mostly in Mysore, from 1792 to 1823.

Faizi, Akbar's poet laureate and the elder brother of Abul Fazl, translated the Lilavati into Persian in 1587. The Lilavati is the arithmetic part of the Siddhanta Shiromani, written by the mathematician Bhaskaracharya (Bhaskara II) in the twelfth century, and it covers numbers, fractions, progressions and measurement.

Jaugada is in Odisha, not Karnataka, so only pairs 2 and 3 are right. Jaugada, in Ganjam district of Odisha, is one of the two places, with Dhauli, that carry Ashoka's Separate Kalinga Edicts.

Bali Jatra, meaning the voyage to Bali, is held at Cuttack on the bank of the Mahanadi on Kartik Purnima, when people float small paper and banana bark boats in memory of the merchants of Kalinga who sailed to Bali, Java, Sumatra and Borneo; the same day is marked as…

Korkai lay near the mouth of the Tamraparni in the present Thoothukudi district, and it was the headquarters of the Pandya pearl fishery of the Gulf of Mannar, praised by the Periplus and by the Sangam poets; the sea has since receded and left the site inland.

The correct answer is B, Rajendra I, the son of Rajaraja I, who in 1025 of the Christian era sent a Chola fleet across the Bay of Bengal against Srivijaya, the trading power that controlled the straits of Malacca and Sunda, and recorded the campaign in his inscriptions along with…

The Sangam poems and later Sanskrit texts call pepper yavanapriya, literally dear to the Yavanas, the word used for the Greeks and Romans who crowded the Malabar ports for it.

Around the middle of the first century of the Christian era this pilot is said to have worked out the rhythm of the south west monsoon, after which ships ran straight from the mouth of the Red Sea to the Malabar coast instead of hugging the shore, cutting the voyage…

Tamralipti is modern Tamluk in Purba Medinipur district, on the Rupnarayan river near its meeting with the Hooghly.

Arikamedu, on the Ariyankuppam river near Puducherry, is identified with the Poduke of the Periplus and the Poduke emporion of Ptolemy.

Muziris, called Muchiri in Tamil sources, stood near Kodungallur on the Periyar, and the excavations at Pattanam in Ernakulam district have yielded Roman amphora sherds, glass beads and brick structures that fit its description in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.

It drained the trade of the Satavahana and Kshatrapa lands through the Narmada and Tapti valleys and sent out cotton cloth, long pepper, spikenard and gems.

Lothal lies in the Bhal region of Gujarat, near the head of the Gulf of Khambhat, and was excavated by S. R. Rao.

The Satavahanas of the Deccan issued coins mainly in lead and in potin, an alloy of copper with tin, lead and zinc, and some of their issues carry a two-masted ship, which historians read as evidence of their sea-borne trade on the eastern coast.

With effect from 1 April 1957 the rupee ceased to be divided into sixteen annas and sixty-four pice and was divided instead into one hundred units, called naye paise at first and, from 1964, simply paise.

The Arthashastra of Kautilya describes a large body of superintendents, and the Lakshanadhyaksha was the superintendent of the mint, responsible for striking coins of the prescribed weight and alloy.

These coins show a king with the Lichchhavi princess Kumaradevi on one face and a seated goddess with the legend Lichchhavayah on the other, and they are conventionally attributed to Chandragupta I, whose marriage to her strengthened the early Gupta state; some scholars believe his son struck them in his…

Gupta gold coins, called dinara, survive in greater numbers than those of any other ancient Indian dynasty, and their types form a gallery of royal images: the King and Queen type, the Ashvamedha and Lyrist types of Samudragupta, and the Archer and Chakravikrama types of Chandragupta II.

Jahangir struck a celebrated series of gold and silver coins showing the twelve signs of the zodiac, and another series carrying his own portrait, which is unusual in Islamic coinage; he also issued coins in the name of Nur Jahan.