All but 9 of the 6,449 Islamic coins found at Athenian Agora up to the date when this book was written belong to the Ottoman period. The earliest datable Ottoman coin is from the reign of Mehmed I (1413-21). Most of the coins come from overseas mints such as those of Istanbul, Cairo, Macedonia, Serbia, and Bosnia. Although the name of Athens cannot be read on any coin, the author thinks that many of the crude coppers of the 15th to 16th centuries A.D. were locally struck.
E-Book Content
THE
ATHENIAN AGORA RESULTS OF EXCAVATIONS CONDUCTED BY
THE AMERICAN SCHOOL OF CLASSICAL STUDIES AT ATHENS
VOLUME
THE
IX
ISLAMIC
COINS
BY GEORGE
C. MILES
o
go
.,0,00
.4.
c,
0,
4i~~~a.L
*00
THE AMERICAN SCHOOL OF CLASSICAL STUDIES AT ATHENS PRINCETON,
NEW JERSEY
1962
PUBLISHED
WITH
THE
AID OF A GRANT
ALL RIGHTS
PRINTED
IN GERMANY
FROM MR. JOHN
D. ROCKEFELLER,
RESERVED
at J.J. AUGUSTIN
GLO CKSTADT
JR.
PREFACE
T
he present catalogue is in a sense the continuation of the catalogue of coins found in the Athenian Agorapublished by MissMargaretThompsonin 1954, TheAthenianAgora:Results of the Excavations conductedby the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Volume II, Coins from the Roman throughthe Venetian Period. Miss Thompson's volume dealt with the Roman, Byzantine, Frankish, Mediaeval European and Venetian coins. It was in the spring of 1954 that on Professor Homer A. Thompson'sinvitation I stopped briefly at the Agora on my way home from a year in Egypt and made a quick survey of the Islamic coins found in the excavations. During the two weeks spent in Athens on that occasion I looked rapidly through the coins and reported that despite their somewhat unalluring appearance and their relative insignificance with respect to the history of the Agora as a whole, they constituted a body of material, almost all of it Turkish,which could not very well be ignored and which was probably not without some purely numismatic interest, however obscure. In the next few years some effort was made, but without success, to find a competent student to prepare a catalogue of these coins. In the end I volunteered to undertake the work myself; and during the autumn of 1958 and the latter half of 1960 I was able to spend several months at the Agora examining and classifying the coins. The introductory matter and the catalogue were finally completed in Princeton and New York in 1961. I would like to express here my thanks to the many friends who have helped me in the course of my work on these coins, and my appreciation of the facilities affordedby several institutions. Among those to whom I am especially indebted at the Agora and the American School of Classical Studies are Homer A. Thompson, John L. Caskey, Lucy Talcott, Alison Frantz and Poly Pamel Demoulini. I would gladly recount in detail the nature and extent of their assistance, but they have done me the honor of considering me a member of the Agora family and I must be content only with the mention of their names. To my wife, to my daughter, MarianMiles McCredie,and to Miss Anne Barr Bradley go my very warm thanks for their work in Athens on the uninspiring concordances,and to Mrs.BarbaraW. Wikoff for the continuation of this work at Princeton. Without the cooperation and assistance of several institutions I could not have undertaken this catalogue: the American Numismatic Society, whose officers facilitated my trips to Greece in 1958 and 1960 by giving me leave of absence from my duties there; the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, where I was made to feel at