1 Cowrie Kaudi

Cypraea moneta shells were harvested primarily in the Maldives and traded across the Indian Ocean in quantities that, by some medieval accounts, reached into the hundreds of millions annually. The Bengali market alone absorbed such volumes that Maldivian rulers structured their entire state economy around controlled export. Cowries circulated as money across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and parts of China for longer than any metal coinage system in history — the Chinese graph for "money" itself derives from a pictograph of the shell.

In Bengal, British colonial administrators formally demonetized cowries in 1825, the date that closes this specimen's attribution window.