Coins of the Bactrian and Indo-Greek Rulers (BIGR) is an innovative research tool which provides a typology and catalogue of the coins issued under the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kings and queens who ruled over an area consisting of parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, eastern Iran, and Pakistan. From the initial period of independence of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom from the Seleucid empire under Diodotus I in the mid-third century BCE to the final Indo-Greek rulers at the beginning of the first century CE, coins provide the best, and in many cases, only evidence of the sovereigns under whom they were produced. Given the lack of other sources, much about the history of this period is uncertain and BIGR aims to make clear the limits of our knowledge, for example, by avoiding mint attributions and specific dates.

BIGR is organized using a new typology of Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins, created by Gunnar Dumke and Simon Glenn, published first here. The current version will soon link to coins in the major collections of the American Numismatic Society, Ashmolean Museum, Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Münzkabinett of the State Museum of Berlin, British Museum, and the Fitzwilliam Museum. A print volume with commentary on the BIGR typology and other aspects of the coinages, published by the American Numismatic Society, will follow in 2024. Funding for the project, a joint initiative between the American Numismatic Society and the Ashmolean Museum and Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents at the University of Oxford, was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

BIGR includes Kharoṣṭhī Unicode characters in legends and for control marks throughout the typology. A Kharoṣṭhī font might not be installed by default in your operating system. We recommend the open source font at https://fontsource.org/fonts/noto-sans-kharoshthi.

BIGR is made possible by stable numismatic identifiers and linked open data methodologies established by the Nomisma.org project. Coin type data are made available with an Open Database License. All images and data about physical specimens are copyright of their respective institutions. Please see the Contributors page for further details about individual licenses.