I recently won this well-preserved medieval Islamic coin from one of John Anthony's auctions: Pishkinids, as vassals of the Ildegizids. AE dirham (30mm, 14.7g). Ahar mint. Mahmud ibn Pishkin II (608-623 AH/1212-1226 AD). Obverse: "La ilah illa Allah/ Muhammad rasul Allah/ Salla Allah 'alihi/ al-Nasir li-Din Allah/ Amir al-Muminin." Reverse: "Atabek al-'azam/ Uzbek bin Muhammad/ malik al-amara/ Nusrat al-Din Mahmud/ bin Pishkin bin Muhammad". Album 1916. Many medieval Islamic coins have only inscriptions giving religious doctrine, announcing political affiliation, and listing genealogies of rulers, and this is no exception. After a standard kalima "There is no God but God/ Muhammad is the Messenger of God" we jump right into the very complicated politics of the Muslim world in the early 13th century. The short answer to "Who struck this coin" is the Pishkinid dynasty of maliks (kings), which ruled from 1155 to 1231 AD. The dynasty was descended from a Georgian nobleman who was captured by the Seljuk Turk sultan Alp Arslan in 1068 AD and brought back to Iran as a prisoner. The Pishkinids, however, were not fully independent but ruled as vassals of the Ildegizid atabegs. The Ildegizids were a dynasty of Kipchak Turk origin who ruled over northwest Iran, Azerbaijan, and adjacent bits of Turkey, Armenia, and Iraq. Atabegs were originally tutors who were regents for Seljuk princes, but who often ended up staying on in power and creating independent splinter dynasties. The Ildegizids finally gave up the pretense of loyalty to the Seljuks in 1194. Other independent atabegs of the time were the Artuqids and Zangids, well known to numismatists for their extensive and fascinating pictorial coinages. Finally, the coin also mentions the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, al-Nasir. The caliphs were the successors to Muhammad as head of the Muslim community and had both temporal and spiritual authority. By this time, however, the temporal authority of the caliph was reduced to Baghdad itself, although most rulers still cited him on their coins. That's a lot of politics to fit on one coin! Like all Pishkinid coins, this was struck at Ahar, a city in the very northwest of modern Iran. A traveler in the early 13th century, Yaqut al-Hamawi, described the city as "very flourishing despite its small size." There were extensive copper mines near the city, which may explain the large size of the coin and the relative commonness of Pishkinid coins despite the minor and short-lived nature of the dynasty. All in all, quite a nice coin that led me to several pleasant hours reading up on history.
These Georgian coins fascinate me for 2 points. One is that they were minted in both Georgian and Arabic despite being a Christian kingdom. Secondly, they have some notoriously irregular shaped coins that appears as if they were merely cutting or melting pieces of copper to circulate and have little to no attention to making decent coins
Thanks for the write-up. You very nicely illustrated how the text on these coins tell a story about the political arena at the time ! Just takes a bit of study and not being deterred by non-western scripts.
The script is what drew me to Islamic coins, even as a kid the calligraphy fascinated me. I didn't start collecting till about five years ago.
@Parthicus I do believe that coin found the right home! Way to really explain and provide context for that coin, I enjoyed the read.
