Recent Work on the Monetary and Metrological History of Egypt, 868–1517 C.E.

Abstract

It is a truism in the fields of Islamic history that those who study the course of Islam in Egypt are blessed with a relative abundance of surviving primary sources, whether they be literary, documentary, archaeological, or material. This is also the case for numismatic evidence. In fact, the coinages of Muslim Egypt (and of the Syrian areas controlled by dynasties based in Egypt) are the subject of one of the deepest historiographies in Islamic numismatics. From the early catalogues of the British Museum and Khedival collections edited by Stanley Lane-Poole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the 1982 catalogue of the Egyptian National Collection prepared by an Egyptian–American team and published by the American Research Center in Egypt, to subsections of numerous other catalogues, many specimens of Egyptian coinage have been made available for study. Using this numismatic evidence, from 1956 to 1980 the coinages of three Egyptian dynasties were analyzed in separate and significant monographs: Oleg Grabar’s The Coinage of the Tulunids (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1957); Paul Balog’s Coinage of the Mamlūk Sultans of Egypt and Syria (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1964); and Balog’s The Coinage of the Ayyūbids (London: Royal Numismatic Society, 1980). While these three works did not and do not represent the final word about these coinages, in bringing the numismatic evidence to a wider audience of scholars interested in related topics they in turn stimulated further numismatic scholarship. Until recently, however, the numismatic developments of the Ikhshīdid period (935–969) and the Fāṭimid period (969–1171) lacked focused studies aiming for comprehensive treatment of those eras. The appearance of three works published over 2006–2007 have filled this lacuna. 1 (This leaves only the Ottoman period of Egypt without its own monographic treatment. Coins minted in Egypt prior to the rise of the Ṭūlūnids are best approached as subsections of Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid numismatics.) Moreover, the recent posting of a digital resource presenting the entire holding of Islamic glass weights preserved in the Gayer-Anderson Museum provides a useful resource for those interested in the small-scale metrology of Islamic Egypt. As a result, students and scholars now have at their fingertips a chronologically comprehensive set of references to aid in their study of numismatics and wider monetary history for Islamic Egypt. Moreover, these works solidify the important roles played by Jere L. Bacharach and Norman D. Nicol, who along with Paul Balog (d. 1982) have done so much to advance the field.