Warren C. Schultz

Mamlūk Metrology and the Numismatic Evidence

Metrology (the study of weights and measures) and numismatics (the study of coins and coin-like objects) are separate yet obviously related fields of inquiry. When it comes to the study of the money of the medieval Islamic world, an awareness of the former is necessary to understand the latter. This is especially true for the precious metal coinages of gold (dı̄nārs) and silver (dirhams), for they “were usually paid by weight and not by count”. Thus an awareness of the smaller metrological units linked to a certain coinage is often essential to grasping how that coinage circulated and was valued. Islamic metrology is a complex subject in its own right.3 It was not always and everywhere the same, as medieval Muslim authors themselves were aware.4 This complexity is further complicated by the terminology used in the medieval Islamic sources. It is overlapping and inconsistent; a single term may have multiple meanings depending on the context in which it is encountered. The term dirham, for example, may mean any one of a number of different weight units used for different goods as well as a silver coin or a unit of account. It is well known that the earliest truly Islamic coinage, established after the reforms of the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik b. Marwān (65–85/685–705), consisted of silver dirhams of an ideal weight (also called a dirham) equivalent in modern terms to 2.97 grams, and gold dı̄nārs struck to a mithqāl weight unit equal to 4.25 grams. However the terms dirham, dı̄nār and mithqāl, were subsequently applied to coins and weight units that often were very different from this “classical” case. The reader need only survey the holdings of the major institutional collections of Islamic coins to see multiple proofs of this. Rather than assume that the “classical” weight values were in place for the Sāmānid or Aghlabid dynasties, to cite but two random examples, it is good practice to check the surviving evidence—literary, documentary, and numismatic—to ascertain the values in use in those particular regimes. Thus it makes practical sense to speak of Islamic metrologies rather than Islamic metrology. In what follows, I examine the available evidence for whatever light it can throw on the values of the smaller weight units utilised in the monetary system of the Mamlūk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria (648–922/1250–1517).8 This is not an idle exercise. As I

LI GUO, Early Mamluk Syrian Historiography: Al-Yunini's Dhayl Mir[ham]at al-Zaman, 2 vols., Islamic History and Civilization: Studies and Texts, vol. 21 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998).

The importance of Qutb al-Din Musa al-Yuninis (d. 726/1326) Dhayl Mir[ham]at al-Zaman has long been recognized by historians of the medieval Islamic world. In this book, Li Guo places this author and his work in the context of early 14th-century Mamluk Syrian intellectual developments and provides both a translation (vol. 1) and an edition of the Arabic text (vol. 2) for the five-year period 1297–1302. The result is a valuable work of historiography and philology.