One Very Old, One Possibly From Mauritius? | Egypt, Zanzibar

I only just realised! My Dad actually pointed it out to me.

Maybe EgCollector will jump in with some knowledge

Not for long; thanks to cat's promptings, we've both now got one less coin sitting in our Unknown albums.

Here is my example of a similar coin, which I mentioned in the previous post. Though it's as clear on my coin as it is on yours, I'd never read it as "Misr". I just assumed it was part of a longer word that had been truncated.



And here is the zeno.ru database index for coins of Ottoman Egypt. Click on any of the sultans from the late 1500s or early 1600s (such as Murad III, Mehmed III and Ahmed I) and you'll see many coins like ours, such as this one and this one. The last two sultans are even given in the Krause catalogue, since they reigned in the 1600's; Mehmed III is KM#3, Ahmed I is KM# 9. Prices were given for both back in 2003 at about $10 in Good, $30 in Fine. If zeno.ru is any guide, the coins of Murad III are commoner and therefore likely to be cheaper. Unattributable ones are probably cheaper still.

Given the preponderance of re-attributions and ambiguities on those zeno.ru pages, I suspect even the experts have difficulty attributing certain coins to specific rulers. Apparently the information giving the date and ruler's name was on the dies used to strike the coins, but the coins weren't struck heavily enough for all that information to make it onto the coins themselves; many have dates and names that are "off the flan".

I am content simply saying "Ottoman Egypt, copper manghir (also known as a fals), circa 1600 AD". It's certainly better than the "Enigma - dark bronze, Islamic" that it was previously filed under.

Oh man Sap thats awesome! Thanks so much for the info.

Cat