Early Islamic Coinage

UPDATE Summer 2024.

This article was earlier declined by a leading journal specialising in Islamic studies and another concerned with the ancient history and archaeology of the southern Levant, citing rather absurd and disingenuous objections, which included the lack of originality! I believe that they did so fearing its possible political ramifications. I therefore decided to make this important study freely available online here and let my peers decide on its merits. It has since clocked up more visitors than any of my other publications on this website. Shortly after an earlier draft was posted on Academia.edu, Ahmad Ahmadi of Teheran University expressed to me his appreciation of my article. He requested my permission to translate it into Farsi and have it published in the Iranian Islamic studies journal, JAP. I was happy to accede to his request, and the article was duly published under both our names in vol. 30, issue 178 [2019], of that journal. That Farsi version can be found in the listing of my journal publications.

Arabic Glasses (Coin weights, jetons and vessel stamps) from Umayyad Syria, in T. Goodwin (ed.), Coinage and History in Seventh Century Near East 5. Proceedings of the 15th Seventh Century Syrian Numismatic Round Table held at Corpus Christi College, Oxford on the 17th and 18th September 2016, London, Archetype, 2017, pp. 175-195

This dissertation uses all of the available evidence provided by coins to construct a numismatic history of the early Islamic precious metal coinage of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula.

The dissertation begins with a review of the analysis undertaken by earlier scholars, followed by an explanation of the adopted methodology, including the approach to the primary and secondary sources and the description of the methods used in the metrological, metallurgical, and die estimation analyses.

The balance of the dissertation is divided into three sections. The first section is the typology, which divides the coinage into four series: Series 1, the Two Imperial Bust type; Series 2, the Latin Epigraphic type; Series 3, the Bilingual type; and Series 4, the Post-Reform type. The typology analyses each series in detail. This section also discusses the iconographical elements of the coinage, with a further chapter providing an analysis of certain anomalous examples that do not readily fit into the typology.

The second section encompasses the analysis of the metrological and metallurgical aspects of the coinage and the estimation of the number of dies for each series. The final section combines the numismatic evidence and the historical record provided by a variety of secondary sources into a numismatic history of the two regions. This section includes a discussion of the historical context prior to, during, and after the Muslim conquest of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, as well as a discussion of find spots and circulation.

The dissertation concludes with a comparison of the evolution of the precious metal coinage in North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula to the evolution of Islamic coinage in other regions of the Umayyad Caliphate and an exploration of the underlying nature of the coinage (i.e. regional, Imperial, etc.).

This dissertation uses all of the available evidence provided by coins to construct a numismatic history of the early Islamic precious metal coinage of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula.

The dissertation begins with a review of the analysis undertaken by earlier scholars, followed by an explanation of the adopted methodology, including the approach to the primary and secondary sources and the description of the methods used in the metrological, metallurgical, and die estimation analyses.

The balance of the dissertation is divided into three sections. The first section is the typology, which divides the coinage into four series: Series 1, the Two Imperial Bust type; Series 2, the Latin Epigraphic type; Series 3, the Bilingual type; and Series 4, the Post-Reform type. The typology analyses each series in detail. This section also discusses the iconographical elements of the coinage, with a further chapter providing an analysis of certain anomalous examples that do not readily fit into the typology.

The second section encompasses the analysis of the metrological and metallurgical aspects of the coinage and the estimation of the number of dies for each series. The final section combines the numismatic evidence and the historical record provided by a variety of secondary sources into a numismatic history of the two regions. This section includes a discussion of the historical context prior to, during, and after the Muslim conquest of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, as well as a discussion of find spots and circulation.

The dissertation concludes with a comparison of the evolution of the precious metal coinage in North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula to the evolution of Islamic coinage in other regions of the Umayyad Caliphate and an exploration of the underlying nature of the coinage (i.e. regional, Imperial, etc.).

In the course of the 9–10 th centuries A.D. the region lying between the Oxus and Jaxartes Rivers, known as Transoxania or Mā warā' al-nahr (Arabic), was governed by the Samanid dynasty. Like several other regions located on the northeastern fringes of the Iranian world, early Islamic Transoxania had been remarkably slow to abandon the pre-Islamic figural coinage which had circulated locally before the Arab conquests. The provinces of Tabaristan, Khwarazm, Transoxania and Sistan form a belt which circles Iran, starting from its northern border on the Caspian Sea in the case of Tabaristan, and continuing down the eastern frontier which separates Iran from the steppe, from Khwarazm in the north, via Transoxania, to Sistan in the south. All four regions retained their local figural coinages well into the 8 th century A.D., long after the rest of Iran had adopted the aniconic gold and silver coinage introduced by the Marwanid caliph, ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān, in the last years of the 7 th century. The Abbasid governors who ruled these regions from the middle to the end of the 8 th c. continued to issue figural coins, in some cases, like Sistan, alongside regular caliphal dirhams. By the end of the 8 th century, virtually all local issues were discontinued and caliphal coinage became the rule. Although no longer struck, these local figural coins, much like the Sasanian and Arab-Sasanian issues of Iran in the 8 th c., probably continued to circulate for many years before finally being replaced in the monetary stock by caliphal issues. The one exception to this pattern of eastern Iranian monetary usage was Transoxania. Here the figural silver, the so-called Bukharkhuda dirhams, continued to circulate alongside the locally-struck caliphal dirhams for several centuries, throughout the Samanid period and well into the Qarakhanid period (11-13 th centuries). 1 The Bukharkhuda coinage was modelled on a Sasanian prototype, a late 5 th –century drachm first struck in the city of Merv by the Shahanshah Varahran V (420-438 A.D.), which was later adopted by the rulers of Bukhara in Sogd. In the course of its long life, the Bukharkhuda drachm underwent significant changes in fabric and design. It first incorporated a Sogdian inscription next to the imperial bust; it later became progressively stylised in appearance; in the early Abbasid period, the names of caliphs and governors appeared alongside the bust (see Fig. 1); and at some time, probably beginning with the earliest Abbasid issues, the coinage began to suffer severe debasement, resulting in some hoard finds which appear to be composed mainly of base metal coins. A very extensive literature, much of it written by 19 th and 20 th century Russophone archaeologists and numismatists, has grown up around the Bukharkhuda series. 2 Up to the 1990s research was focused mainly on the question of the monetary function of the Bukharkhuda coinage of the 8 th –13 th centuries, though substantial progress has been made in the last two decades on the question of the pre-Islamic history of this coinage. 3 This paper is only concerned with the history of the Bukharkhuda coinage during the Samanid period, and in particular with its role as the coinage in which the various regions of Transoxania remitted taxes to the Samanid amirs in Samarqand and Bukhara. The current scholarly consensus holds that Bukharkhuda dirhams were used for the payment of taxes throughout the 9 th –10 th centuries. Yet as a student of Samanid history, it has often occurred to me that while it makes good sense to accept Ibn Khurradādhbih's evidence that taxes were paid in these coins in the early 3 rd /9 th century, when these coins constituted the local monetary stock and the Samanids had been in power for less than two decades, it is more difficult to explain why the Samanid amirs would have retained the system throughout the 4 th /10 th century, when their state had became one of the great powers of the Islamic world. From the late 9 th century, they ruled a huge territory, comprising most of Eastern Iran, including Khurasan as well as Transoxania, which was administered by a centralised bureaucracy located in Bukhara, that had access to human and financial resources which were superior to those available to contemporary successor states in the post-Abbasid world. The Bukharkhuda coinage of the early 9 th century was not a single coinage, but rather a complex series of three different coinages, each one known by a different name (musayyabī, ghiṭrīfī, muḥammadī). It is assumed that these three issues were visually distinct one from another, contained a high 1 The terminology adopted in this paper follows that of Naymark (1999). Pre-Islamic Bukharkhuda issues are referred to as Bukharkhuda drachms, while Bukharkhuda coins with Arabic inscriptions are called Bukharkhuda dirhams. This paper will only deal with the question of the circulation of these dirhams, not with the much debated matters of their silver content or their date of issue. Walker believed that Bukharkhuda dirhams were not struck later than the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mūn, while others believe that some of the more common types continued to be struck in the Samanid period and later.

الحمد لله، والصلاة و السلام على سيد خلق الله نبينا محمد، عليه وعلى آله أتم الصلاة والتسليم. لا تخفى على أحد أهمية استخدام المراجع العلمية الموثوقة في عملية البحث العلمي،  و حيث أننا قد أمرنا بالعلم والتعلّم، كان لزاما علينا السعي للحصول على المعرفة والمعلومة الصحيحة من خلال مصادرها المتعددة. وليس عالم المسكوكات الإسلامية باستثناء، فمنذ بداية الاهتمام بعلم المسكوكات بشكل عام، و المسكوكات الإسلامية بشكل خاص، نشر الباحثون والمختصون و الخبراء كثيراً من الكتب والأبحاث ، و المجلات والمقالات المتخصصة بهذا العلم.
وسعياًَ منا للإفادة والاستفادة، سنتطرق في هذه الندوة إلى ذكر نماذج من أهم المراجع المتعلقة بالمسكوكات الإسلامية والتي لا غنى عنها لأي باحث أو هاوي. وبطبيعة الحال لن يكون هناك مجال لذكر جميع المراجع الموجودة وإنما سنذكر بعض المشهور والمعروف منها، مع ذكر نبذة بسيطة – في بعض الأحيان - عن مزايا كل مرجع وأهميته.

The fifth century AH/eleventh century CE in Shām and the Jazīra was a period of a receding monetary economy, and drastically shrinking number of produced coins. Contemporary legal texts supported by archaeologically provenanced coin finds suggested that the reduced highly alloyed black dirhams were only circulating in a narrow region of origin. It came therefore as
a surprise to find the earliest Numayrid dirham far from its supposed mint in Ḥarrān (modern Altınbaşak, Şanlıurfa Province, Turkey) in an excavation in Tiberias. The coin also establishes a terminus post quem for a disputed dating of the particular site.

درهم عباسي نادر و غير منشور ضرب دمشق سنة 193 هجرية في أول سنة من سنوات تولي الخليفة الأمين. علاوة على كون الدرهم غير منشور فقد تميز بمأثورات الظهر المميزة، و يحمل حرف (ه) في أسفل مأثورات الظهر و هذا الحرف شبيه بالحرف التي ظهر على دراهم الرشيد منذ نهاية الثمانينات بعد المئة إلى سنة وفاته سنة 193 هجرية و خصوصاً في ضروب مدينة السلام.

Depuis 2011, le Projet germano-danois du quartier nord-ouest de Gerasa mene des recherches archeologiques sur la zone la plus elevee de l’ancienne ville enceinte. En 2014, les fouilles ont debute sur la « terrasse orientale », qui s’etend sur environ 3 000 m2 et surplombe l’Artemision d’epoque romaine. Cette zone etait recouverte par d’importants deblais qui enfermaient les vestiges d’un habitat domestique du debut de l’epoque islamique, detruit par le tremblement de terre de 749 et jamais reoccupe depuis. Une maison privee a ete en partie fouillee (secteur K). Elle ne recouvre aucune phase ni romaine ni byzantine et a ete abandonnee a la suite du tremblement de terre avec l’ensemble de son mobilier. L’absence de phases chronologiques anterieures, le mobilier ainsi que la destruction soudaine de cette habitation en font un exemple important qui permet d’entreprendre une etude des permanences et des changements de la culture materielle de l’Antiquite tardive au debut de l’epoque islamique. L’habitat et les...

This dissertation uses all of the available evidence provided by coins to construct a numismatic history of the early Islamic precious metal coinage of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The dissertation begins with a review of the analysis undertaken by earlier scholars, followed by an explanation of the adopted methodology, including the approach to the primary and secondary sources and the description of the methods used in the metrological, metallurgical, and die estimation analyses. The balance of the dissertation is divided into three sections. The first section is the typology, which divides the coinage into four series: Series 1, the Two Imperial Bust type; Series 2, the Latin Epigraphic type; Series 3, the Bilingual type; and Series 4, the Post-Reform type. The typology analyses each series in detail. This section also discusses the iconographical elements of the coinage, with a further chapter providing an analysis of certain anomalous examples that do not readily fit...

من مجموعتي الشخصية، درهم نادر من نقود ممالك طوائف الموحدين في منتصف القرن السابع الهجري، وهو درهم أمير الغرب المستعين بالله موسى بن محمد بن نصير بن محفوظ.
و يزن هذا الدرهم النادر 1.50 جراماً ، و تبلغ أبعاده 15x15 مم، أما مأثوراته فقد جاءت على النحو التالي:
مأثورات مركز الوجه :
الله ربنا
محمد رسولنا
العباس
امامنا
مأثورات مركز الظهر :
امير الغرب
المستعين بالله
موسى بن محمد
بن نصير بن محفوظ

Syrian coppper coins modelled after Sicilian issues of Constantine IV feature the Pehlevi legend "mlt'n MLKA", "mardan shah", "King of the men". We believe that that this might refer to the Mardaites, which would explain the totally unusal use of Pehlevi in Syria.

1) The "severed head" type: We try to show that it is in fact derived from a Byzantine model showing two standing emperors, the left of which is getting more and more reduced.
2) The "orans" type in Syrian copper coinage is not a independent type, but a variant of the main type featuring a standing emperor.

This is a note record for copper coins (AE) issued in the caliphal era (632-945) without a mint name on the coin--exceptional, but not exactly uncommon. "no mint" is a numisgeek phrase for such coins. I call attention to a statement by the great numismatist D. M. Metcalf: "every coin has a mint, and it is the numismatist's basic task to establish with as much certainty and precision as possible where, and when, each piece was struck." In many cases, the issuing mint for these coins has been identified and a cross-reference has been placed in the record for the issues of that city in my notes, which is where the information belongs, but despite its inanity, "no mint" is still a useful category for anything like a database.