E. J. Rapson

Edward James Rapson FBA (12 May 1861 – 3 October 1937)[1] was a British numismatist, philologist and professor of Sanskrit at the University of Cambridge.

[1][2] He attended the Hereford Cathedral School and then St John's College, Cambridge, where he was elected a classical foundation scholar in 1883.

[1] In 1887 Rapson was appointed assistant in the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum,[3] and also elected a fellow of St. John's College.

These factors, possibly combined with increasing age, meant that Volume II of the History, for which he was the editor, was incomplete at the time of his death in 1937.

He had confided to colleagues that the slow pace of the work meant that large parts of it needed to be updated to include the latest scholarship.

E.J. Rapson, 1861–1937
Coin of the Western Satrap Chastana, from Rapson's "Indian coins in the British Museum", 1908
Coin of the Western Satrap Bhumaka, 2nd century CE, from Rapson's "Indian coins in the British Museum", 1908