Islam / Mideast Numismatic Literature: Reviews (555)
Andrew V. Liddle, Coinage of Akbar
Published by the Kapoori Devi Charitable Trust, Gurgaon (India), 2005. In English. Harbound with dust jacket, 89 pages plus 34 color plates.
This is not a comprehensive catalogue of mint/date combinations, but looks like it will be an invaluable aid in identifying the myriad types of Akbar in all three metals. The book contains the following:
Military Campaigns and Conquests (1 Page)
Akbar as Administrator (1 Page)
Religious Policy (1 Page)
Akbar as Patron of Art and Architecture (1 Page)
Coins of Akbar - A list of all mints known on gold, silver and copper, respectively, followed by an alphabetical list of all mints with an approximate location and other pertinent information.
Symbols and Ornaments on Akbar's Coins - Line drawings of 67 symbols found on Akbar's coins along with a list of mints and metals on which the symbols are found. (A very important contribution!) There are notes about the origin and meaning of some of the symbols.
The bulk of the work is a description of different types in all three metals. There is a good written description of each type along with a list of the mints that produced the type and the range of known dates. There are 42 Gold types, 77 Silver types, and 67 Copper types. There are also notations about errors, two pages of Controversies, and three pages on additional notes on eight new mints.
Then there is a map showing all of Akbar's mint towns, a bibliography and several appendices.
Appendix 1 - Hijri and CE date conversions and Persian word dates
Appendix 2 - Ilahi and Hijri date conversions and Ilahi months written in Persian
Appendix 3 - Mints of Akbar written in Arabic script
Appendix 4 - Mint epithets written in Arabic with a transliteration and translation and mints that used the epithet.
Appendix 5 - Phrases and pious wishes on Akbar's coins. Written in Arabic, transliterated and translated.
Appendix 6 - Couplets on Akbar's coins. Written in Arabic, transliterated and translated.
Finally, the color plates with color photographs of each type, some types showing multiple mints. The photos of gold and silver coins are mostly readable, those of copper coins are often too dark to make out everything. However, the photos are more useful when used in conjunction with the written descriptions of the types and with available museum catalogues.
I can recommend this book to anyone interested in the coins of Akbar or Mughal coins in general. It is not of the caliber of Aman ur Rahman's recent exceptional book on Babur (subject of an earlier email from me), but it is better than anything else I have seen on the coins of Akbar.
Jim Farr from posting to islamic_coins@yahoogroups.com 10/02/05
Lowick, Nicholas Early 'Abbasid Coinage: A Type Corpus 132-218H
The Lowick/Savage Abbasid corpus was actually begun by John Walker in the late 1930s; in fact, the obverse and reverse type numbers come from his charts, later modified to include types not known to him back then. Walker subsquently turned to Arab-Sasanian and Arab-Byzantine, published in 1941 and later to his remarkable, though now outdated, corpus of Umayyad coins. He then resumed work on the Abbasid project, though without the intensity previously devoted to the Umayyad work.
Lowick acquired Walker's charts and reference cards when he became curator at the BM in 1965, but it was not until the late 1970s that he decided to regenerate the project. Lowick examined material published after Walker's last research, as well as public and private collections. In about 1983 he visited me here in Santa Rosa to study my collection (now at Tuebingen). He decided to split the work into two parts, one covering the period AH 132-218, the second AH 218-334 plus the relatively small number of subsequent issues (until the death of al-Musta'sim in AH 656). Unfortunately, Lowick's health began to decline by the end of 1984, leading to his pre-mature death in 1986.
The project was than passed along to Judy Kolbas, then living in London. She reorganized the material based on 1987/88 software, at first on an old computer no longer produced, then on a Mac. She continued to examine new material, especially in auction catalogues, as well as dealers' stock and private collections. In particular, Muhammad Limbada of London was especially helpful to Kolbas, in part because of his own extensive interest in and broad collection of Abbasid silver and copper coinage. Kolbas's principal effort was to transfer Lowick's handwritten information into computer software that could produce a publishable text. She was also intent on expanding the number of listings by dividings mint/date types into subvarieties that extended beyond Walker's type definitions.
As her interest and research on Mongolian culture developed, Kolbas gave up the project after about 2 or 3 years. The work passed along to Elizabeth Savage, who continued to assemble the corpus in the inherited software. Much to her dismay, the software proved to be increasingly complicated. For example, the text had to be divided into two separate documents, one for the left hand (even-numbered) pages, the other for the right (odd-numbered) pages, with the result that any change in one document had to be balanced by an equivalent adjustment in the second document, an unbelievably annoying nuisance. This was complicated by the fact that each coin descriptions extended from the left to the right page. By the mid-1990s the text was utterly unwieldy, but conversion to something like Microsoft Word would have required at least a month or two or rather boring transcription.
As for the multitude of errors and misattributions, I don't know how they developed into massive quantities. I had used Lowick's index cards (many inherited from Walker) for identifying some of my own coins, and don't recall so many mistakes at that time.
When in London in about 1999 or 2000, I had a long discussion with Savage, trying to persuade her to return to the project, if sufficient financing could be located. She understood that the original software was essentially useless, and had been discontinued so long ago that it would not operate on modern computers. The thought of spending several months retyping the entire text into modern formats was too discouraging. The existing text was then printed out in something like 20 or 30 copies for distribution to academic sources, and there have been many photocopies printed out since then.
Stephen Album, posting to islamic_coins@yahoogroups.com 10/06/05