Posted 06/21/2008 04:51 am
After pondering the stamp some more, I have a couple more observations:
The curved stroke running across the stamp looks like the Arabic letter "Th", or a similarly shaped letter, like "B" or "T".
They definitely look like numbers below the "Th". I can read "315". One might assume it's the date "1315", which would be 1897/8 AD.
I did some searching on Zeno.ru for countermarked Ottoman coins, and found this one very similar to yours, with Arabic letter "B" and the numbers "315" beneath. The experts there say the "B" is short for the Arabic word for "devalued", "315" is indeed the date 1315, and the counterstamp was done in the Dardanelles-Gallipoli region of Turkey, to indicate the coin had a reduced face value.
The curved stroke running across the stamp looks like the Arabic letter "Th", or a similarly shaped letter, like "B" or "T".
They definitely look like numbers below the "Th". I can read "315". One might assume it's the date "1315", which would be 1897/8 AD.
I did some searching on Zeno.ru for countermarked Ottoman coins, and found this one very similar to yours, with Arabic letter "B" and the numbers "315" beneath. The experts there say the "B" is short for the Arabic word for "devalued", "315" is indeed the date 1315, and the counterstamp was done in the Dardanelles-Gallipoli region of Turkey, to indicate the coin had a reduced face value.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
