Recent work on the monetary and metrological history of Egypt, 868-1517 C.E.

• Author: Schultz, Warren C.
• Position: 'Islamic History through Coins: An Analysis and Catalogue of Tenth-Century Ikhshidid Coinage', 'A Corpus of Fatimid Coins' and 'A Complete Catalog [Sylloge] of the Glass Weights, Vessel Stamps and Ring Weights in the Gayer-Anderson Museum, Cairo (Mathaf Bayt al-Kritiliyya - Book review

It is a truism in the fields of Islamic history that those who study the course of Islam in Egypt are blessed with a relative abundance of surviving primary sources, whether they be literary, documentary, archaeological, or material. This is also the case for numismatic evidence. In fact, the coinages of Muslim Egypt (and of the Syrian areas controlled by dynasties based in Egypt) are the subject of one of the deepest historiographies in Islamic numismatics. From the early catalogues of the British Museum and Khedival collections edited by Stanley Lane-Poole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the 1982 catalogue of the Egyptian National. Collection prepared by an Egyptian--American team and published by the American Research Center in Egypt, to subsections of numerous other catalogues, many specimens of Egyptian coinage have been made available for study. Using this numismatic evidence, from 1956 to 1980 the coinages of three Egyptian dynasties were analyzed in separate and significant monographs: Oleg Grabar's The Coinage of the Tulunids (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1957); Paul Balog's Coinage of the Mamluk Sultans of Egypt and Syria (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1964); and Balog's The Coinage of the Ayyabids (London: Royal Numismatic Society, 1980). While these three works did not and do not represent the final word about these coinages, in bringing the numismatic evidence to a wider audience of scholars interested in related topics they in turn stimulated further numismatic scholarship. Until recently, however, the numismatic developments of the Ikhshidid period (935-969) and the Fatimid period (969-1171) lacked focused studies aiming for comprehensive treatment of those eras. The appearance of three works published over 2006-2007 have filled this lacuna. (1) (This leaves only the Ottoman period of Egypt without its own monographic treatment. Coins minted in Egypt prior to the rise of the Tulunids are best approached as subsections of Umayyad and 'Abbasid numismatics.) Moreover, the recent posting of a digital resource presenting the entire holding of Islamic glass weights preserved in the Gayer-Anderson Museum provides a useful resource for those interested in the small-scale metrology of Islamic Egypt. As a result, students and scholars now have at their fingertips a chronologically comprehensive set of references to aid in their study of numismatics and wider monetary history for Islamic Egypt. Moreover, these works solidify the important roles played by Jere L. Bacharach and Norman D. Nicol, who along with Paul Balog (d. 1982) have done so much to advance the field.

The first of the monographs to be discussed here is Jere L. Bacharach's Islamic History through Coins: An Analysis and Catalogue of Tenth-Century Ikhshidid Coinage. This book was co-awarded the 2007 Samir Shama Prize by the Royal Numismatic Society, an award given every two years for the best book in the field of Islamic numismatics published during that period. At the heart of this volume is a corpus of Ikhshidid coins (part two). In numismatic publications, a corpus is an attempt to bring together in one volume all known specimens of a coinage. (2) In Bacharach's book, the corpus consists of more than 1,200 coin specimens, information about which was collected over thirty-five years of study. These specimens are in turn organized into 224 types (for more on types, see below). The catalogue of these types is organized into three categories: gold coins, silver coins, and "other numismatic material." Within the first two categories, the material is subdivided chronologically by regnal period, and then further by mint. The final category of "other numismatic material" is broken into sections on copper coinage, Ikhshidid coins from Mecca, and presentation pieces.

In order to understand the coins detailed in this three-part catalogue, however, it is necessary to become familiar with the first section of part two which provides a schematic of coin types. As Bacharach points out, defining what constitutes a type is notoriously difficult (pp. 107-8). For our purposes here, a type may be understood as a unique combination of metal, mint, design, and legend, keeping in mind that the design and legend on one side of a coin almost always vary from those found on the other side. In Bacharach's volume these variables are organized by a series of abbreviations or codes. Each of these codes is accompanied by an illustration of a coin bearing that particular design. This system is perhaps best understood by example: type 110 in the catalogue, p. 131, is a silver dirham of Muhammad ibn Tughj from the Mir mint. The entry...