Posted 03/05/2010 7:45 pm
OK, I think I've narrowed it down. It's a very early Islamic piece, a copper fals from either the Umayyad or Abbasid Caliphate, circa 800 AD, plus or minus a century. Similar coin on zeno.ru.
The legible bits of script aren't too helpful in identifying the coin: inside the circle on the top pic, it says "there is no God but Allah alone" and the text in the circle on the other side says "Mohammed is the prophet of Allah". Most early Islamic bronzes have texts like these on them. The distinctive inscriptions that could identify this coin are, unfortunately, missing.
These coins were usually struck with the date and mintmark, but the date and mint-city (if present) are written out in full Arabic words around the rim on the side shown in your bottom pic; as is often the case with these coins, there's too much damage around the rim to be able to read either. Here is a similar coin but with most of the outside text visible, enabling a clearer identification, from what is now northern Iraq or western Syria.
And while they did conquer much of the Byzantine Empire, northern Africa and Spain, neither the Umayyad nor Abbasid Caliphate conquered India. So no, it's not "Indian".
The legible bits of script aren't too helpful in identifying the coin: inside the circle on the top pic, it says "there is no God but Allah alone" and the text in the circle on the other side says "Mohammed is the prophet of Allah". Most early Islamic bronzes have texts like these on them. The distinctive inscriptions that could identify this coin are, unfortunately, missing.
These coins were usually struck with the date and mintmark, but the date and mint-city (if present) are written out in full Arabic words around the rim on the side shown in your bottom pic; as is often the case with these coins, there's too much damage around the rim to be able to read either. Here is a similar coin but with most of the outside text visible, enabling a clearer identification, from what is now northern Iraq or western Syria.
And while they did conquer much of the Byzantine Empire, northern Africa and Spain, neither the Umayyad nor Abbasid Caliphate conquered India. So no, it's not "Indian".
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
