Abd Al Malik

In this contribution a few remarkable Arab-Byzantine coins are discussed. They were struck in late 7th-century Bilād aš-Šām. This core province of the Umayyad Caliphate, adjacent to the Byzantine Empire, is also known as historical (Greater) Syria or the Levant. The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, strengthening certain findings or assumptions of earlier research; on the other, reconsidering a somewhat overlooked hypothesis. In the first category nearly all considered issues can ultimately be traced back to questions of die cutting and die linking. As for the revisited hypothesis, it fits in the broader context of the propaganda war conducted between two rival empires at the end of the 7th century, the Umayyad Caliphate and Byzantium. This paper reflects the modest hope of a non-professional numismatist to offer the specialists some material they can build on, and to broaden, to a limited extent, the debate about early Umayyad coinage and Arab-Byzantine relations.

Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Muslim b. ʿUbaydallāh b. ʿAbdallāh b. Shihāb b. ʿAbdallāh b. al-Ḥārith b. Zuhra b. Kilāb, better known as Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742), was one of the founders of Islamic tradition in the widest sense of the word.  After a life rich in pioneering scientific achievements, he died at his estate where he retired in his later years. Details of Z.’s biography are discussed in the first three sections of the present study, while the last three deal with geographical aspects of his estate. The emphasis on the geographical data is methodologically important, as it stems from my conviction that the history of Arabia should be studied with constant reference to the abundant geographical information at our disposal.

How did the theology of Islam and its idea of an empire  evolve, based on the Hellenistic Romano-Iranian foundation, in the face of Christianity, Judaism, Neo-Platonism and Zoroastrianism? This much debated question has once again raised much scepticism and polemic against ‘established’ knowledge and its sources. The extreme points of view taken in this controversy at large are possible to maintain because there are few undisputed Arabic sources on the first decades of Islam.  In this discourse, imagery and text messages on coins became more important than ever, because the knowledge of these coinages has grown tremendously since the 1990s. Coins offer the only continuous and contemporary independent and primary source for the period of the genesis of the new religion and its empire from Spain to Central Asia. Frequently interpretations of the Islamic coin imagery by political and art historians disregard the proper numismatic context of the seventh century AD. The present contribution attempts to provide a brief overview on the development of the coin imagery, as it is discussed today.

This is the first of my articles on the introduction of coinage in Bilad al-Sham. There are statements that I would not repeat today, but also some insights that haven't been improved upon. This appeared in a 1976 pamphlet from the American Numismatic Society, A Colloquium in Memory of George Carpenter Miles, 1904-1975, which is now available in full for free download from the Hathi Trust.

Curator Rebecca Darley, Co-Curator Daniel Reynolds, Assistant Curators Ali Miynat & Maria Vrij
8 November 2013 to 30 November 2014
The attached is the Money and Medals Newsletter in which the review of this show at the Barber Institute in Birmingham appeared. The editor cut the names of the curators when he printed (I am sure he made some other changes as well, but I noticed that one) so I've placed them at the top of this note.