Pocket Change Islamic
This essay is being written on December 31, 2021, to be posted on January 4, 2022. It seems like a suitable moment to think about calendars and years and how people define them.
The presence of year dates on coins is tremendously useful to the numismatist—probably more useful than the dates generally were to the governments that decided to put them on the coins, usually for administrative control. And numismatists are well aware that many different dating systems are found on coins from antiquity, from the Islamic world, and from Asia, ranging from regnal years to local eras to major religion-based…
On April 9, 2021, Pocket Change hosted a post of mine that took issue with the popularization of a theory…
1837 woodcut depicting Henry Every receiving the treasure from the Ganj-i-Sawai onto his ship, the Fancy.
In a remarkable shift away…
Egyptian banknote, 25 piastres, 1978
The history of images depicted on Arab banknotes is a study of visualizing modern nationalism. Egypt,…
Figure 1. Chinese spade money, c. 770–475 BC (ANS 1937.179.14763).
The American Numismatic Society cabinet contains a remarkable collection of Chinese…
Husam al-Din Timurtash. ANS 1917.215.1394
One of the really wonderful things about numismatic study is the way that coin types frequently…