Last year I opened with a possible Volga-Bulgar imitation dirham as my first purchase of the year. Oh how things have changed in a year! I even bought that coin at a coin fair, something which given the current circumstances here is quite impossible… Some things stay the same however, as this year I open with another Volga Bulgar dirham and a marvellous upgrade on all levels if I may say so myself! Volga Bulgars, Emir Almish Yaltavar. Silver dirham (Bolghar, ca. 920-930 AD). Rispling dies K102-58/R37. Ex New York Sale 2013, lot 422. Ridiculously high res version for anyone who likes to spend hours zooming in on the tiniest of scratches. At first glance, this dirham seems like a regular Samanid dirham from Al-Shash. Its calligraphy is fairly coarsely rendered, yet it is still clear the coin cites the Abbasid Caliph Al-Muqtadir (908-932 AD) as the overlord, the Uzbek city Al-Shash (Tashkent) as its mints and a date that is somewhat reminiscent of a blundered 308 (920-921 AD). The last line of the reverse however, where normally the Samanid ruler would be cited, reveals the true origin of this piece; a semi-nomadic Turkic people on the banks of the middle Volga. It had up until quite recently been misread as ‘Al-Amir Barman’, but while inventorying the corpus of Islamic dirhams found in Sweden, Rispling came across specimens where this last line was remarkably clear; a previously proposed reading of ‘Al-Amir Yaltavar’ instead gained favour. The exact history of Volga Bulgars is hard to pin down, as written records concerning them are sparse and were written by Arabic or Russian outsiders. Originally an Oghur tribe settled recently around the northern shore of the Black sea, an invading Khazar forced the Bulgars out and disintegrated their unified state; several Bulgarian tribes migrated westwards to the eastern Balkan and would later found the First Bulgarian Empire and the Bulgaria we know today. Others settled on the banks of the Volga and Kama rivers and under the vassalship of the Khazars founded their own Volga Bulgarian state. Their strategic location on the major routes between the Arab world and Scandinavia allowed them to play a pivotal role in the trade between these two worlds; fur and slaves going down south, while Islamic silver flowed into the northern economy. Dirham finds from Viking Sweden and Gotland (the Spillings hoard for example) are too numerous to count and also provide the origin for most of these Volga Bulgar imitations. Numismatically speaking, the dirhams of Yaltavar are the first we can properly ascribe to the Volga Bulgars. While it seems regular imitations, not citing the Bulgar emir, instead faithfully copying the inscriptions of the Samanid prototype, were struck earlier in the tenth century by the Volga Bulgars, differentiating those from other imitations struck by various different polities in Eastern Europe is difficult. While for some types die-links to the ‘official’ Volga Bulgar dirhams have been found, the attribution of many remain uncertain. While the mint of this dirham is not mentioned on the coin itself, it is almost certain it would have been struck in their capital and important trade hub of Bolghar. Coinage of the successors of Yaltavar explicitly mention this mint on their coinage, although later Volga Bulgarian coins in the 340’s were also struck in Suwar. For me, it is impressive for another reason; a connection between the issuer of this coin and one of my favourite writers of the 10th century. Most people will be familiar with the writer, traveller and theologian Ibn Fadlan because of his descriptions of the Viking Rus. His writings have become infamous for his description of a gruesome ‘Viking’ funeral he attended. And while these passages on the Viking Rus and Varangians certainly take centre stage in his book, it is arguably the Volga Bulgars we have to thank for them! In 921, a certain Volga Bulgar ruler Almish Yaltavar (an old Turkic word translating to ‘client ruler’) you might have heard of, sent an ambassador to the Abbasid Caliph Al-Muqtadir in Baghdad. Intensive contact with the Islamic world had exposed the Bulgars to their faith and Almish, a recent convert to Islam queried the caliph on matters of religion and Islamic legal practices. Or in Ibn Fadlans’ own words (taken from the translation by Lunde and Stone): "He asked him therein to send him someone who would instruct him in religion and make him acquainted with the laws of Islam; who would build him a mosque and erect for him a pulpit from which might be carried out the mission of converting his people in his whole country and in all districts of his kingdom. And he prayed the Caliph to build a fortress wherein he might defend himself against hostile kings. I was chosen to read the message of the Caliph to him, to hand over what he had sent him as gifts and to have oversight over those learned in the law and the teachers” Al-Muqtadir, likely sensing an opportunity to expand his sphere of influence, sent out a diplomatic party to the land of the Volga and Kama. The Abbasid ambassador, a court Eunuch, with Ibn Fadlan in his entourage as chief religious advisor, arrived early the next year. After their long journey the delegates were welcomed with open arms, intrestingly enough involving loads of dirhams being scattered: "When we were two farsakhs away from the king, he came out to meet us in person. When he saw us, he dismounted and fell down with his face to the ground to give thanks to God, the All High, the Almighty. In his sleeve, he had dirhams which he scattered over us. He had tents pitched for us and we settled down in them” Who knows, the scattered dirhams could have even been of this type! This exact coin might even have been scattered across Ibn Fadlan himself! Jokes aside, it seems the ‘scattering’ of dirhams was indeed an important part of Volga Bulgarian court life. He later continues: “When I had finished reading, members of the king’s entourage scattered a large number of dirhams over him. Then I got out the presents, which consisted of scent, cloth and pearls intended for him and his wife, and I presented them, one after another, until we had finished the whole business. Then, I gave his wife a robe of honour before the whole company. She was sitting beside him, for that is their custom. When I had given her this robe of honour, her women scattered dirhams over her and then we went back to our tents.” Ibn Fadlan wastes no time and immediately starts to correct the religious practices of the Bulgars: “Before I arrived, the khutba was read for the king from his pulpit in these words: ‘O God! Preserve King Yiltawar, king of the Bulghars.’ I said to him: The king is God and from the pulpit none but He, the All-high and the All-powerful, should be called king. Your master, the Commander of the Faithful, is satisfied that the following should be pronounced from the pulpits in both East and West: ‘My God, preserve your slave and caliph, Jafar, al-Imam al-Muqtadir-billah, the Commander of the Faithful.’(..) Then the king said to me: ‘In what form may the khutba be read for me, then?’ ‘Using your name and that of your father,’ I answered. ‘But’ he said, ‘my father was an unbeliever and I do not want his name mentioned from the pulpit, and as for myself, I do not want my name mentioned either, because he who gave it to me was an unbeliever. But what is the name of my master, the Commander of the Faithful?’ ‘Jafar’ I told him. ‘Am I allowed to call myself by his name?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Then I shall take the name of Jafar and my father that of Abdallah. Give the man who pronounces the khutba his orders.’” Almish thus took the Islamic name Jafar Ibn Abdallah. Sadly, no dirhams were struck mentioning this name, but the Islamic name of his successor Mikail Ibn Jafar (son of Jafar) does appear on Volga-Bulgarian coinage! There are many amazing passages on the Volga Bgulars in Ibn Fadlans Risala and I highly recommend anyone interested in the period should have a look! The topics he discusses are quite broad; from their political organisation, their legal system, their excessive use of dreadfully smelling fishoil, to their taboo on urinating while armed... This type, mentioning Yaltavar, had been on my wishlist for quite a while and was to be the definitive Volga Bulgar coin for me. This Ibn Fadlan connection and the fact that this is the first we can properly ascribe to this fascinating people being the major reasons behind choosing this type over some of the later dirhams that also carry an accurate mint. This specific example was one I had come across before and considered my ‘dream-dirham’; it had previously sold in a New York Sale in 2013 and I had little hope of it reappearing on the market any time soon. It is an exceptionally well-struck example on a broad and flat flan, nicely toned, clean fields, not holed or otherwise damaged (as is the case for the majority of these on the market) and is thus one of the nicer ones outside of museum collections. When it reappeared this January at the same venue I immediately recognised it and fell in love with it all over again; I decided to place a bid quite a bit higher than it hammered for in 2013, but thought it was rather hopeless as most Islamic hammers have been relatively high these past months. In the end, it sold for below the original hammer and needless to say, I’m over the moon with it! Please share anything you find relevant! (Including tips on getting the smell of reeking fishoil off of your coins )
@AnYangMan, thanks for a memorable confluence of historical and numismatic research. (EDIT --And, Somebody needs to Slap me (preferably a safelely deceased grandma ...?) a remarkable example of a remarkable issue. Took a quick look at two favorite references for the Viking Age, primary and secondary (the Hollander translation of the Heimskingla, and Jones, A History of the Vikings), and found exactly nothing to complement your research, based on Ibn Fadlan's eyewitness account ...which I don't have. ...Oh, Right, and the Coin! Independently of the engraving style, the combination of flan and strike compares very favorably to any Samanid dirham I've ever seen. ...And, Right, here are the two examples of Samanids that I have pics of. With apologies, neither one is attributed by reign. 'Hacksilver,' from a dealer based in Estonia. What's left of a full dirham. A metal detecting find from Worcestershire, in the southeastern part of the English Midlands. Even though the very occasional Samanid dirham has been found in York and Dublin --two distinctly Norse kingdoms, as of the 10th century CE-- the geography was off for anything as easy as either of those options. To some extent, Lawson (Cnut) came to the rescue. He notes that Cnut appointed several Scandinavians as earls in this part of England --thinly settled by Vikings in the preceding, 10th century-- and that he encouraged new Scandinavian settlement, specifically in Worcestershire. (See esp. 165-8.) With that for speculative pretext, it's possible to see the pointedly worn state of the dirham as a symptom of perhaps as much as a century of circulation. In other words, it would have travelled far and wide in the Scandinavian world before it found its way to any place as 'tame' as Worcesterhire. (Public service announcement: if Worcester has a football team, and I just insulted it, apologies all around.)
Wow, that's a great coin and excellent write-up @AnYangMan ! I can post two relevant coins. The first is an ordinary Samanid AE fals, in the name of Al-Mansur, struck at Bukhara in AH 356: The second is one of my highlights of 2020, an Abbasid-imitative dirham attributable to the Khazars, which I wrote about previously: https://www.cointalk.com/threads/a-very-rare-coin-of-the-khazars.362251/#post-4586785
