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Lot 199
Great Mongols. temp. Ögedei. AH 624-639 / AD 1227-1241. AR Multiple Dirham (32.6mm, 15.92 g, 5h). Balad Kurraman mint. Undated. VF, toned.
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Live Auction
Islamic Auction 4 – Session 1
Live bidding began Oct 19, 2023 at 2:00 PM BST
Category
Description
Great Mongols. temp. Ögedei. AH 624-639 / AD 1227-1241. AR Multiple Dirham (32.6mm, 15.92 g, 5h). Balad Kurraman mint. Undated. Obverse: fi balad / al-Kurraman in square frame with floral ornaments in segments / Reverse: har ki nastirad / gunahkar / shad (‘Who does not accept this coin is a sinner’) in three lines. Cf. CNG Islamic Auction 1 (25 May 2022), lot 208. Possible traces of mounting. VF, toned. Extremely rare.
Ex Triton XXIV (January 19 2021), lot 1231.
According to the Encylopædia of Islam the Kurram valley is a thin wedge of territory, through which flows the Kurram River, a tributary of the Indus. It is some seventy miles long and covers an area of 1,305 square miles on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. From the legends on the coin it would appear that the town of Kurraman was a largely independent, self-governing territory whose strategic position facilitated trade and communication between Afghanistan and the Indus Valley. This is made clear because the town's exceedingly rare coinage is totally anonymous, and owes allegiance to no political entity. However, this coin was almost certainly struck during the reign of the Mongol Great Khan Ogedei, and Kurraman could be said to exist in the shadow of his distant rule. The legends on all the coins from the Kurraman mint at this time, gold, copper and now silver, are always identical. This coinage does not appear to have been struck by any individual political authority, and apart from the name of the mint itself, it does not bear the usual name of a ruler or the year of its striking. Thus, it depended for its acceptance on the prestige of the Kurraman mint, the high quality of its metal and the phrase in Persian (the lingua franca of this region and age), ‘Whoever does not accept this coin is a sinner,’ which admonished those who might object to using it because they were put off by its anonymity. This is the first recorded silver coin of this type from the Kurraman mint. Its weight is heavier than that of the coins usually found in the region. It could be categorized as an early example of a silver tanka before the weight of this denomination was fixed by later rulers in Afghanistan and India to facilitate trade.
The final winners of all CNG Islamic Auction 4 – Session 1 lots will be determined during the live sale that will be held on 19 October 2023.
Winning bids are subject to a 22.5% buyer's fee for bids placed on this website and 25% for all others.
We recognize that our users may have various Internet Browsers and Operating Systems. We like our visitors to have the best possible experience when using our bidding platform. However, we do recognize that it is impossible to develop applications that work identically, efficiently and effectively on all web browsers. The CNG bidding platform supports the latest stable major version and stable previous version of Chrome and Firefox.
Ex Triton XXIV (January 19 2021), lot 1231.
According to the Encylopædia of Islam the Kurram valley is a thin wedge of territory, through which flows the Kurram River, a tributary of the Indus. It is some seventy miles long and covers an area of 1,305 square miles on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. From the legends on the coin it would appear that the town of Kurraman was a largely independent, self-governing territory whose strategic position facilitated trade and communication between Afghanistan and the Indus Valley. This is made clear because the town's exceedingly rare coinage is totally anonymous, and owes allegiance to no political entity. However, this coin was almost certainly struck during the reign of the Mongol Great Khan Ogedei, and Kurraman could be said to exist in the shadow of his distant rule. The legends on all the coins from the Kurraman mint at this time, gold, copper and now silver, are always identical. This coinage does not appear to have been struck by any individual political authority, and apart from the name of the mint itself, it does not bear the usual name of a ruler or the year of its striking. Thus, it depended for its acceptance on the prestige of the Kurraman mint, the high quality of its metal and the phrase in Persian (the lingua franca of this region and age), ‘Whoever does not accept this coin is a sinner,’ which admonished those who might object to using it because they were put off by its anonymity. This is the first recorded silver coin of this type from the Kurraman mint. Its weight is heavier than that of the coins usually found in the region. It could be categorized as an early example of a silver tanka before the weight of this denomination was fixed by later rulers in Afghanistan and India to facilitate trade.
The final winners of all CNG Islamic Auction 4 – Session 1 lots will be determined during the live sale that will be held on 19 October 2023.
Winning bids are subject to a 22.5% buyer's fee for bids placed on this website and 25% for all others.
We recognize that our users may have various Internet Browsers and Operating Systems. We like our visitors to have the best possible experience when using our bidding platform. However, we do recognize that it is impossible to develop applications that work identically, efficiently and effectively on all web browsers. The CNG bidding platform supports the latest stable major version and stable previous version of Chrome and Firefox.
