Buyid Coinage

This is a catalogue of medieval Iraqi and Iranian coinage, struck within the 10th-11th centuries AD. The Buyid dynasty ruled in Baghdad, Western Iraq and central Iran for over 100 years (c322-c440 AH). Their coinage is of interest because it is one of the earliest and most plentiful regional coinages of the pre-modern Islamic world. It displays a variety of fabric, morphology and inscriptional content that is exceptional. This catalogue draws on all the major public collections of Islamic coinage in the western world, as well as several private collections, and includes several thousand coins. It describes and illustrates every die identified as belonging to the series and thus represents a new departure in the field of Islamic numismatics, which hitherto has not produced any large-scale die studies. The density of coverage in this catalogue should provide the basis for analysis of many historical problems of a monetary and political nature that have not yet been examined.