Walking Back From 1600 With Dated Coins

Strong work @aqui!
I didn't realize that Southern Song Dynasty cash could be dated to a single year. I'll have to check to see if I can add anything from the few that I've got in my collection!

@aquil' Some excellent Southern Song Dynasty coins, and like @Spence, I didn't realise that they were dated to the year, fantastic!



That's an excellent translation off of the dirhem, (which is a fairly tidy specimen too). A question, after Imam Almustasim, there are two words which look (to me) to read ba llah asaid, but I can't make out the meaning. Any clues? And your scribing is very good too, native?

I would think that apart from a week or so, 557 AH is entirely within 1162 C.E.
Accordingly, 556 AH would be almost entirely within 1161 C.E.

Yes of course "billah", why couldn't I see that? billah is like "by Allah" or "of Allah"and amir, yes perhaps. Thank you. All great coins, @j1m will be happy to cross out some more dates.

Ok thx @ttk for confirming the date of that Dirham. Here is a second one, but dated one year earlier: AH 556:






And with this post, I am sad to announce that I will be sitting on the sidelines until the mid-10th Century. Weirdly, all of my Song Dynasty coins are Northern and I have nothing else with an AH date for another 200ish years.

I've been way from the thread for quite a while, but have (surprisingly?) an AH 533 European coin coming up. Not sure if that corresponds to 1138 or 1139?

Will be curious to see if any others show up. There were quite a few AH dated types struck there (Sicily) in the 530s and 540s, though I haven't got a feel for how scarce they are.

If we are on 1139 today, I'll post this Sicily follaro which bears the date AH 533. Best I can tell, that hijri year ran from Sept. 8, 1138 to August 28, 1139.

This is probably the coin I was most looking forward to when I started this thread.
AFAIK it's the world's oldest coin type dated in a positional numeric system* (that is, to the best of my knowledge, the actually-Islamic places didn't start using digits rather than words in their dates until later, while all dated ancient coins use some variety of nonpositional numerals), and IIRC this is one of the clearest dates I've seen on that type, too (they're often partially off flan, especially that complicated 5).

That's an interesting combo of the Byzantine-style depiction of Jesus on one side and Arabic lettering (with Islamic date!) on the other side, too.
I wonder what the religious split would have been like in Sicily at the time - was it mostly Christian, mostly Muslim, or roughly even?


*) It doesn't quite count as the oldest coin type dated in Hindu-Arabic numerals, because of the Western Kshatrapa edge case. It is almost certainly the oldest coin type dated in positional Hindu-Arabic numerals - or at least I'm not aware of any earlier.