Ottoman Empire, Akã§e 1481

Very nice!

I hope we can get down to this year for the how far back can we go? thread.

jbuck: That's my goal. I Think we're still at 1502 right?

Sap, are you for real? That is awesome, thanks alot! And yes, Bayezid (or Bayezit?) sounds familiar.

Not sure. I asked again if Pheroow's 1502 counts.

The language on Ottoman coins is always "proper" Arabic. Even letters and sounds unique to Turkish (such as in the names of some of the Sultans) were transposed into their nearest Arabic equivalents.

These old Islamic coins can be difficult for modern Arabic-speakers to read, for the same reason that mediaeval European coins can be difficult for modern European-language-speakers to read: by our rather fussy modern standards, the lettering on old coins is simply badly written. The wording I've translated above is rather a lot of words to fit onto a tiny little coin, so the die engravers took quite a few shortcuts - short vowels are omitted entirely, other letters are occasionally skipped here and there, details that might help distinguish one letter from another are omitted or put in the wrong place, and words are disassembled and their letters scattered all over the place, wherever they will fit.

As Richard Plant says in the book I quoted above, it's very often the case that "we have to know what a word is before we can be sure of our reading of it".