My first (sizeable) gold

Khwarazmian empire
Ala ad-din Muhammad II
1200-1220AD
Bukhara mint
Gold dinar, 4.76g

Not long after this coin was minted, the city of Bhukara was sacked by the mongols along with other cities, leading to the destruction of the empire.

The story is as follows:

In 1218, Genghis khan contacted Muhammad II, the Shah of Khwarazm to open trade relations. He sent a group of merchants led by a mongol for this purpose but they were accused of spying and arrested on the Shahs orders. Genghis then sent an envoy of three men to explain the situation. The envoy was executed by Muhammad II and the merchant group was put to death.

This led to Genghis khans invasion of Khwarazm with a force of 150,000 men in 1219.

Muhammad II fled and died on an island in the caspian sea not long after.

 

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Congrats, a nice one indeed.

 

Very interesting looking gold coin. Which country is this coin from ?

 

Really like that nugget, @Muhammad Niazi ! Well done, congrats!

 

Very nice coin with a fascinating history! Congratulations!

 

So I think I got the location right ? ...Uzbekistan ?

 

Bukhara today is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Be sure to click the 'gallery' tab. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/602/

 

Very nice coin Muhammad. For some reason there are a large number of silver coins from Bukhara and Samarkand in the Lowie Museum on the Berkeley campus. One of my tasks in a central Asian history class (which spent a lot of time talking about the Oghuz Turks and Mongols) was to sort through and attribute some of these coins in the bowels of the museum (basement floors) which as you can tell were not on display but had been excavated/purchased in the latter 19th century. Kind of fun.

 

That's a really nice AV dinar! I especially like the very light red color highlighting the fields.

 

I think this this coin was minted after Genghis got ticked off and replaced past Khwarezm management...


Mongols-
Ghazna mint
Khwarezm
Genghis Khan
1206-1227 CE
AE Jital
Islamic
RARE - only "The Just Kahn" in title
Album 1969 Tye 329

 

Congrats, @Muhammad Niazi, on a Terrific full dinar, with compelling historical context. You and your other, comparable posts are really broadening my horizons; cordial thanks!
The first ancient /medieval gold I ever got --not very long ago-- ran to fractional dinars, variously as minted and clipped. (...Maybe a better word is 'shorn;' the euphemism of art is 'reduced.') I've posted all of them, recently; they run to taifas in al-Andalus and nominal Fatimids in Sicily, along with a late Lombardic imitation of an earlier Fatimid issue from southern Italy, ironically earlier than the official Fatimid one from Sicily. All of this is c. late 10th-11th centuries CE. The point being that medieval gold gets to be its own gestalt. I'm on your page where that's concerned!

 

Yeah even shahs should be careful not to tick off Genghis Khan. I've often wondered why more embassies didn't run into trouble like that back in the day. Maybe they did.

 

...Yeah, back in the day, they did! You could compare ambassadors then to international journalists now. An element of risk was more or less written into the job description.

 

Thanks! Now I remember this one. Spectacular!

 

The sad part is an entire empire wrecked (and who knows how many lives lost, or enslaved) because its leader was bull-headed. I guess that's happened a time or two also.

 

Islamic architecture is Its Own Thing. Thank you (i.e., you knew this already), this picture is a textbook example of where the "Gothic" arch came from, by way of the Crusades ...and, just maybe, al-Andalus before that.

 

Thank you, that's kind of endemic from one end of known history to the other.

 

YES! I loveeee the red stuff on old gold coins. Im unsure what it is though.

Im glad you are enjoying my posts! I own a virtual museum on instagram where I post more often, you can check it out! https://www.instagram.com/treasures_of_pakistan/

need to find this coin to complement the dinars history.

One question that I have about AV dinars is that theres never a standard weight in these. Ive seen examples around 3 grams, some at 6g, some at 5, 4. Values all over the place. was this common?

 

Most dinars are around 3-4 grams, but you are right, there are light ones of 2 grams and heavies of 5 or 6. I'm sure they were all weighed exactly by the salespeople of their time. But also, there's the question of alloys. Sometimes there's not much gold in a dinar, so that it looks like a silver or billon coin. But a coin with 15% gold still had a lot of value for its user.

By the way, many of these gold dinars were weakly struck, like this one: a Khwarezmshah coin of 1200-1220 like yours, mint not mentioned, but minted in Nishapur, date AH 607 (=1210/1211 AD). Album 1712. The weight is 2.95 gr and the diameter 23 mm.



And here is one of those 'gold' coins with a very low amount of gold in it. It's of the Buwayhid or Buyid dynasty that reigned in Persia and east of it (10th-11th century). This coin is very common (and cheap nowadays); the Buwayhids needed a lot of soldiers, that's why. It's also very vague, minted with dies that saw a lot of use.



Technical details:
Buwayhids, pale gold dinar. Baha' al-Dawla Abu Nasr Firuz Kharshah. 398? = 1007/8 AD, but this type was minted for ten or twenty years unchanged. Mint Suq al-Ahwaz (Western Iran). 28 mm, 4.41 gr. Album 1573A. In Zeno you may find a number of these coins.

 

The canonical weight of the Islamic dinar is 1 mithqal (4.25g). Initially, the fineness and weight tolerances were very strictly controlled. Later, the gold remained fine but the weight of individual coins became random, in which case they would have been weighed rather than counted in transactions. Eventually the fineness also decreased, particularly in the east, and the dinar over time became a unit of account. Today in Iran, it takes 4,225,000 dinars to equal 1 US dollar. In 2015, ISIS attempted to reintroduce the canonical gold dinar of 1 mithqal/4.25gm as the official currency of its short-lived 'caliphate'.