Luke Treadwell

This paper re-examines the reign of Aḥmad b. Ṭūlūn (254–270/868-883), taking account of the currently available numismatic evidence. It argues for a reappraisal of the crucial triangular relationship between Ibn Ṭūlūn, the caliph al-Muʿtamid ʿalā Allāh (256–279/869-892) and the latter’s brother Abū Aḥmad (known as al-Muwaffaq billāh from 261/874). The rise of the Tulunids is situated within the context of the weakening of the Abbasid unitary state in the middle of the third century AH/ninth century CE, and the emergence of powerful provincial governors whose rise to power anticipated the eclipse of the caliphal state in the fourth/tenth century. The value of the numismatic evidence lies mainly in the names and titles that occur on the coins. These allow the historian to control the sometimes contradictory narrative of the textual sources and also raise questions about the nature and extent of Tulunid autonomy.

In the course of the 9–10 th centuries A.D. the region lying between the Oxus and Jaxartes Rivers, known as Transoxania or Mā warā' al-nahr (Arabic), was governed by the Samanid dynasty. Like several other regions located on the northeastern fringes of the Iranian world, early Islamic Transoxania had been remarkably slow to abandon the pre-Islamic figural coinage which had circulated locally before the Arab conquests. The provinces of Tabaristan, Khwarazm, Transoxania and Sistan form a belt which circles Iran, starting from its northern border on the Caspian Sea in the case of Tabaristan, and continuing down the eastern frontier which separates Iran from the steppe, from Khwarazm in the north, via Transoxania, to Sistan in the south. All four regions retained their local figural coinages well into the 8 th century A.D., long after the rest of Iran had adopted the aniconic gold and silver coinage introduced by the Marwanid caliph, ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān, in the last years of the 7 th century. The Abbasid governors who ruled these regions from the middle to the end of the 8 th c. continued to issue figural coins, in some cases, like Sistan, alongside regular caliphal dirhams. By the end of the 8 th century, virtually all local issues were discontinued and caliphal coinage became the rule. Although no longer struck, these local figural coins, much like the Sasanian and Arab-Sasanian issues of Iran in the 8 th c., probably continued to circulate for many years before finally being replaced in the monetary stock by caliphal issues. The one exception to this pattern of eastern Iranian monetary usage was Transoxania. Here the figural silver, the so-called Bukharkhuda dirhams, continued to circulate alongside the locally-struck caliphal dirhams for several centuries, throughout the Samanid period and well into the Qarakhanid period (11-13 th centuries). 1 The Bukharkhuda coinage was modelled on a Sasanian prototype, a late 5 th –century drachm first struck in the city of Merv by the Shahanshah Varahran V (420-438 A.D.), which was later adopted by the rulers of Bukhara in Sogd. In the course of its long life, the Bukharkhuda drachm underwent significant changes in fabric and design. It first incorporated a Sogdian inscription next to the imperial bust; it later became progressively stylised in appearance; in the early Abbasid period, the names of caliphs and governors appeared alongside the bust (see Fig. 1); and at some time, probably beginning with the earliest Abbasid issues, the coinage began to suffer severe debasement, resulting in some hoard finds which appear to be composed mainly of base metal coins. A very extensive literature, much of it written by 19 th and 20 th century Russophone archaeologists and numismatists, has grown up around the Bukharkhuda series. 2 Up to the 1990s research was focused mainly on the question of the monetary function of the Bukharkhuda coinage of the 8 th –13 th centuries, though substantial progress has been made in the last two decades on the question of the pre-Islamic history of this coinage. 3 This paper is only concerned with the history of the Bukharkhuda coinage during the Samanid period, and in particular with its role as the coinage in which the various regions of Transoxania remitted taxes to the Samanid amirs in Samarqand and Bukhara. The current scholarly consensus holds that Bukharkhuda dirhams were used for the payment of taxes throughout the 9 th –10 th centuries. Yet as a student of Samanid history, it has often occurred to me that while it makes good sense to accept Ibn Khurradādhbih's evidence that taxes were paid in these coins in the early 3 rd /9 th century, when these coins constituted the local monetary stock and the Samanids had been in power for less than two decades, it is more difficult to explain why the Samanid amirs would have retained the system throughout the 4 th /10 th century, when their state had became one of the great powers of the Islamic world. From the late 9 th century, they ruled a huge territory, comprising most of Eastern Iran, including Khurasan as well as Transoxania, which was administered by a centralised bureaucracy located in Bukhara, that had access to human and financial resources which were superior to those available to contemporary successor states in the post-Abbasid world. The Bukharkhuda coinage of the early 9 th century was not a single coinage, but rather a complex series of three different coinages, each one known by a different name (musayyabī, ghiṭrīfī, muḥammadī). It is assumed that these three issues were visually distinct one from another, contained a high 1 The terminology adopted in this paper follows that of Naymark (1999). Pre-Islamic Bukharkhuda issues are referred to as Bukharkhuda drachms, while Bukharkhuda coins with Arabic inscriptions are called Bukharkhuda dirhams. This paper will only deal with the question of the circulation of these dirhams, not with the much debated matters of their silver content or their date of issue. Walker believed that Bukharkhuda dirhams were not struck later than the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mūn, while others believe that some of the more common types continued to be struck in the Samanid period and later.