Much thanks Eligius and Spence - the catalog is great (being in English the summary is a great story as well). And the zeno link is also a great resource.
Someone once asked for articles about coins - below is a portion of the summary section of the catalog that Eligius posted - a good read imo.
"Around 1250 some Islamic traders, originally from India, established themselves on the northwest coast of Sumatra. They founded ports at the mouths of the Pasangan and the Pasai river. In view of their geographical position in the straits of Malacca, these ports were a key transit point for trade between the West (Italy, Persia and India), the Indonesian archipelago in the East and China in the North.
These ports grew to become the independent kingdoms of Samudra and Pasai with at the head a 'harbour king' called Sultan. It is via these ports that Islam spread through the Indonesian archipelago. The influence and power of these Sultanates were so great that they were the first in the Indonesian archipelago
to strike gold coins (mas).
In about 1510 the Portuguese established themselves in Malacca, attempting to dominate trade through their monopolistic politics. This forced trade towards Acheh on the northwest point of Sumatra, long established but still fairly unknown. Acheh expanded into a powerful kingdom while the importance of Samudra-Pasai declined. In Acheh, gold coins were now also being struck, according to the popular model of Samudra-Pasai. In 1524 Acheh conquered the
area of Samudra-Pasai.
Prior to 1900, little was known with any certainty about the old history of Samudra-Pasai and Acheh. In addition to a few travelogues, there were native chronicles but they tended to be romanticised stories rather than reliable historical documents. This changed at the beginning of the 1900s when the Archaeology Department in the Dutch East Indies made a study of Acheh and discovered the tombs of a number of Sultans. The inscriptions on the tombs related not only the dates of death of the Sultan, but also his ancestry. The Archaeology Department started the description of the genealogy of several rulers of Samudra-Pasai. Some of the legendary rulers also appeared to have been real historical people...."