An Answer in Silver: ‘Abd al-Malik’s Dirham from Damascus
A coin of words
This silver dirham names its city and its year in Arabic and carries no picture. For half a century after the Arab conquests, the caliphs had paid their armies and collected their taxes in coins that looked Byzantine or Persian. Why did 'Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, caliph from 685 to 705, replace them in the 690s with coins made only of words?
Umayyad Caliphate, time of ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (AH 65 to 86, AD 685 to 705), Dimashq (Damascus). AR dirham (2.80g, 27mm, 6h). AH 80 (AD 699/700).
Obv: in field, There is no god but God alone, He has no partner; in margin, In the name of God, this dirham was struck in Dimashq in the year eighty.
Rev: in field, He is God the One, God the Eternal. He begot no one, nor was He begotten, and no one is comparable to Him (Qur’an 112:1 to 4); in margin, Muhammad is the Messenger of God. He sent him with the guidance and the religion of truth, to make it prevail over all religion, however much the idolaters may hate it (part of Qur’an 9:33).
Ref: Album 126.
Note: Very fine. From the collection of Beat A. Klein.
The script is an early angular Arabic hand that later writers called Kufic, after the city of Kufa in Iraq. AH stands for anno Hegirae, the Muslim calendar counted from Muhammad's emigration to Medina in 622.
Damascus and the money of the conquest
Damascus sits in an oasis watered by the Barada river on the edge of the Syrian desert. Arab forces took the city from Byzantium in 635 after a siege; al-Baladhuri, a ninth-century historian at Baghdad, records several versions of the date and the terms (Hitti, pp. 186 to 199). Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan governed Damascus from about 639, became caliph in 661 and kept his court there. The city remained the caliphs' chief residence until the 740s.
The province paid well. Al-Baladhuri gives the annual tax of the Damascus district under 'Abd al-Malik as 400,000 dinars, against 350,000 for Palestine (Hitti, p. 301).
The conquerors kept the money they found. Syria used Byzantine gold solidi and struck copper on Byzantine models, emperor's portrait included. In Iraq and Iran, Arab governors struck silver drachms on the Sasanian model, with the Persian king's bust and a Zoroastrian fire altar. The word dirham itself comes from the Greek drachme, through Middle Persian.
The administration followed the same pattern. In Damascus a Christian, Sarjun ibn Mansur, ran the treasury, and the accounts of Syria were kept in Greek. The Byzantine chronicler Theophanes gives Sarjun the title genikos logothetes, head of the general tax office, under the year 691/2. Sarjun’s father, Mansur, had collected the taxes of Damascus for the Byzantine emperors. Sarjun’s son became the theologian known as John of Damascus.
A rival caliph in Mecca
'Abd al-Malik inherited a divided empire. When he became caliph in 685, during the second civil war, much of the Muslim world recognized a rival, 'Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, who ruled as caliph from Mecca.
The rival's side reached the coinage first. In AH 66 (685/6), the Zubayrid governor of Bishapur in southern Iran struck a Sasanian-style drachm whose margin reads, in Arabic, "In the name of God, Muhammad is the Messenger of God." It is the earliest dated Muslim text known to name Muhammad (Johns 2003, pp. 426 to 427).
'Abd al-Malik won the war. In 692 (AH 72 to 73) his general al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf besieged Mecca and killed Ibn al-Zubayr. In the reading of Robinson and others, the victor then had to show that he stood for Islam himself, and his coins and monuments took up the profession of faith his rivals had put on theirs.
A quarrel with Byzantium
The caliph also paid Byzantium. A peace treaty of the 680s obliged him to send the emperor a regular tribute in gold (Theophanes, Chronographia AM 6178, trans. Mango and Scott).
Theophanes, under the year AM 6183 (690/1), says that the emperor Justinian II broke the peace in part because he refused the coins 'Abd al-Malik sent, on the grounds that they were of a new type never struck before. In his account the caliph asked the emperor to accept them, and war followed; the Arabs defeated the Byzantine army at Sebastopolis in 692 (Theophanes, Chronographia AM 6183 to 6184, trans. Mango and Scott, pp. 509 to 512). Which coins Theophanes meant is uncertain, since they precede the purely inscribed issues of AH 77 to 79.
Justinian answered on his own gold. His solidi of about 692 carry a bust of Christ, by the usual account the first Byzantine coins to do so, with the emperor on the reverse as "servant of Christ."
The caliph's mints experimented in turn. From about AH 74 to 77 they struck gold and copper, with a few silver issues, showing a standing figure with a sword, probably the caliph himself.
Al-Baladhuri tells a story of the same rivalry. Egypt exported papyrus to the Byzantines, and 'Abd al-Malik "was the first to inscribe on the upper part of these fabrics such phrases as 'Declare: Allah is one!'" The emperor threatened to put insults to the Prophet on his gold, and the Umayyad prince Khalid ibn Yazid advised the caliph to "declare the use of their dinars illegal; strike new coinage in place of them" (Futuh al-Buldan, trans. Hitti, p. 383).
A message to Christian subjects
Most of the caliph's subjects in Syria were probably Christians, and the new coins addressed their creed. Every Sunday they recited the Nicene Creed, which calls Christ "begotten of the Father," "begotten, not made." The reverse of this dirham answers with Sura 112, al-Ikhlas ("Sincere Faith"): God "begot no one, nor was He begotten." The obverse adds that God has no partner, sharik in Arabic.
The caliph's monument in Jerusalem makes the address explicit. The mosaic inscription of the Dome of the Rock, dated AH 72 (691/2), carries Sura 112 on its outer face. On its inner face it speaks to the "People of the Book," rejects the Trinity, and declares that God has no son (Qur'an 4:171; Milwright 2016).
The Christians heard the message. The chapter on Islam attributed to Sarjun's son, John of Damascus, reports that Muslims called Christians "Associators," because "we introduce in addition to God a partner, when we declare that Christ is the son of God and God" (On Heresies 100, trans. Janosik; Sahas 1972). In the usual interpretation, every Christian in Syria who paid tax in this silver carried the caliph's answer in his purse.
One coinage, one language
The new coinage settled all three contests at once. It came in stages:
AH 77 (696/7): a gold dinar bearing only Arabic inscriptions, with no mint name; numismatists generally attribute it to Damascus.
AH 78 to 79: an inscribed silver dirham, first at a few mints, then across the empire.
AH 79 onward: dirhams naming Damascus, of the type of this coin, which stayed almost unchanged until the Umayyad dynasty fell in AH 132 (AD 750).
The reformed dirham kept the broad, thin flan of the Sasanian drachm and replaced its pictures with words. Its weight is generally reckoned at seven tenths of the gold mithqal of about 4.25g, or about 2.97g.
The language of the coins then reached the treasury. "Greek remained the language of the state registers until the reign of 'Abd-al-Malik," writes al-Baladhuri, who dates the change to AH 81 (700/1). 'Abd al-Malik gave the task to Sulayman ibn Sa'd, who asked as his fee the tax of the Jordan district for one year, 180,000 dinars, and finished the work before the year was out (Hitti, p. 301). In Iraq, al-Hajjaj, now governor, had the Persian registers converted in the same years (Hitti, pp. 465 to 466).
When the Arabic registers were ready, the caliph called Sarjun and showed him the new plan. Sarjun left in distress and told the Greek clerks he met: "Seek your livelihood in any other profession than this, for God has cut it off from you" (Hitti, p. 301).
The accounts of Damascus had been kept in Greek since the conquest of 635. In AH 81, the year after this dirham was struck, they passed into the Arabic of its legends, and Sulayman ibn Sa'd took Sarjun's place at the head of the treasury.
References
Al-Baladhuri. Futuh al-Buldan. Translated by Philip Khuri Hitti as The Origins of the Islamic State, vol. 1. New York: Columbia University, 1916.
John of Damascus. On Heresies 100. Translated by Daniel J. Janosik in John of Damascus, First Apologist to the Muslims. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016.
Theophanes the Confessor. Chronographia. Translated by Cyril Mango and Roger Scott as The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Album, Stephen. A Checklist of Islamic Coins. 3rd ed. Santa Rosa, CA: Stephen Album Rare Coins, 2011.
Grabar, Oleg. The Dome of the Rock. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Johns, Jeremy. “Archaeology and the History of Early Islam: The First Seventy Years.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 46, no. 4 (2003): 411 to 436.
Milwright, Marcus. The Dome of the Rock and its Umayyad Mosaic Inscriptions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Robinson, Chase F. 'Abd al-Malik. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005.
Sahas, Daniel J. John of Damascus on Islam: The “Heresy of the Ishmaelites.” Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972.
Islamic Awareness, “The Arabic Islamic Inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, 72 AH / 692 CE,” last modified November 12, 2005.
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