Copyright

Geoffrey Khan

Published On

2024-05-06

Page Range

pp. 185–192

Language

  • English

Print Length

8 pages

6. Coinage

Chapter of: Arabic Documents from Medieval Nubia (pp. 185–192)

This chapter describes the various coins and units of money that are mentioned in the documents. The standard unit of currency is the gold dīnār and various fractions of it. The documents also allude to silver dirhams. When interpreting references to monetary amounts in the documents, one must be aware that in some cases the terms used may have been referring to money of account rather than physical coins, i.e., a notional standard rather than medium of exchange. There is evidence from the corpus of a debasement of the silver content of dirhams in the late Fatimid period.

Contributors

Geoffrey Khan

(author)
Regius Professor of Hebrew at University of Cambridge
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2550-9896

Geoffrey Khan (PhD, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1984) is Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge. His research publications focus on three main fields: Biblical Hebrew language (especially medieval traditions), Neo-Aramaic dialectology, and medieval Arabic documents. He is the general editor of The Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics (Brill, 2013) and is the senior editor of Journal of Semitic Studies. His recent publications include The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, Cambridge: University of Cambridge & Open Book Publishers, 2020, Performance of Sacred Semitic Texts (editor, with co-editor Hindy Najman), Dead Sea Discoveries 29, Brill. 2022, and Language Contact in Sanandaj (co-authored with Masoud Mohammadirad), Berlin, de Gruyter, 2024.