Reading arabic dates on coins
Tibor
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Can someone direct me to a website that can teach me how to
read arabic dates on coins? Any help would greatly be appreciated!!
Thanks in advance. Tibor
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It's a tad bit more complicated than you think, but not too bad.
First you need to translate the digits themselves. See the chart here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals
Then you need to convert the date itself. On some coins, the date is in Greogorian calendar (which starts at the birth of Jesus Christ), but in most Arabic coins the Islamic Hijri calendar (which starts when Muhammad fled from Mecca, around 622AD). The Islamic year is only 360 days long, vs the Gregorian year which is 365, which makes the conversion complicated. Fortunately, there are many online calculators that can convert back and forth, for example:
islamicity.org/Hijri-Gregorian-Converter/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
And finally, in some Turkish coins, the date on the coin is not the date of its striking but the date of the ascension of the current monarch. To get from that to the coin's striking date, you need to add another digit which is placed somewhere else on the coin.
Buy this book.
https://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Dating-Guide-Eastern-World/dp/1440230889
https://www.pcgs.com/SetRegistry/collectors-showcase/world-coins/one-coin-per-year-1600-2017/2422
Thank you to desslok and MrBreeze for their responses.
I appreciate the sharing of knowledge!!
The book needs an errata page for the Japan section (see the Amazon review and the lackadaisical response from the publisher when asked). Are the other sections more reliable?
Krause wasn't having a good time with Japan about then...it was IIRC the 2015 catalog that left off a large chunk of Japanese coins entirely (but they uploaded the missing pages onto Amazon AND emailed a pdf to fix that).