Dirham mint of the Northern Provinces of the Umayyad Caliphate (original) (raw)
Daniel Nader -The Coins Mint and the Metals Sources in the Umayyad Period 661 -750 CE
The Caliph or the local governor in the Umayyad era who had effective control over the mint was responsible for the description inscribed on the dinars (gold coins) and dirhams (silver coins), the same person was also ultimately responsible for the gold and silver purity or degree of fineness. Fals is not included in the rules of the mint. Indications of such buoyant economic activity, if accurately captured in the sources, cannot have failed to occasion a significant requirement for capital liquidity. and in turn for precious metals to mint currency. Indeed, when the Islamic caliphate began to issue massive quantities of its own high-quality currency, commencing with the reign of Umayyad Caliph ÝAbd al-Malik bin MarwÁn, the mines of Arabia were exploited to meet the mounting demand for gold bullion. The demand was readily met, as such precious metals the medieval Muslims had in abundance. The primary medieval Arabic sources indicate that the treasury of the nascent Islamic state benefitted from mining revenues starting from its inception. and since the economy of the medieval Muslim empire depended on a sophisticated monetary system employing gold and silver as its official standard currency, the supply or availability of coins in circulation necessarily affected the economic activities of the Near Eastern population at various levels of its social organization. While the supply of coinage was of special consequence in the sphere of prices and wages, a subject particularly relevant to the study of economic history.
The mint of Adharbayjan and its localization in the early Islamic period
Studia Numismatica et Islamica in honorem Lutz Ilisch. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Lutz Ilisch, 2022
The article offers a discussion on the probable localization of the mint Adharbayjan in the early Islamic period. An up-to-date catalogue with gold dinars and silver dirhams struck in the mint of Adharbayjan in the Umayyad and Abbasid era can also be found in the article.
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.
A typology of Dirhams from the mint of Aleppo under the sultan Barquq
Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Lutz Ilisch, 2022
Ohne ausdrückliche Genehmigung ist es nicht gestattet, dieses Buch oder Teile daraus auf photomechanischem Wege zu vervielfältigen oder unter Verwendung elektronischer Systeme zu verarbeiten und zu verbreiten. Printed in Germany ISBN 978 3 8030 1110 7 Umschlag vorne: ʿabbāsidische Geschenkmünze () des Kalifen al-Muqtadir bi-'llāh (reg. 908-932), wahrscheinlich zu Bagdad geprägt (FINT 1991-16-24). Umschlag hinten: 341 H. (952/953) in Hausam geprägter Dirham des zaiditisch-ʿalidischen Herrschers Abu 'l-Faḍl Ǧaʿfar aṯ-Ṯāʾir fi 'llāh (FINT 1991-16-69). The editors would like to thank the following organizations and individuals without whose financial support the publication of this book would hardly have been possible: