ID help please. What is this...

[Russellhome]

I assume it is a coin - and probably old. It appears to be made of bronze and is kind of crude around the rim. It is about twice as thick as a nickel and a little smaller than a dime. Any ideas about what it is and approx. how old it is?







I don't even know if the photos are upside down or not.

This is a coin I've had forever and I'm not really sure when or how I got it. It is kind of neat - so I've just kept it in the foreign coin box.

[Robert]

Oh boy... those Islamic coins are hard for me to identify.

Just a guess, but to me it has a look of of an Afghanistan Falus. The size and metal fit. Afghan coins from that time often have three rows of writing on each side... many other "Eastern" coins (such as Turkish or Egyptian coins) do not. It could possibly also be Iranian or maybe from parts of India as well. Somewhere in that region of the world is my guess.

The date... since it's obviously not machine made (i.e. no nice, uniform planchet) I would say it's from the mid-1800s at the latest and possibly several hundred years older than that.

Looking in my Krause it appears that Arabic is written right to left except numbers which are written left to right. I believe the date is on the bottom of the first picture, although it may be backwards. The two vertical lines that look like "1"s are in fact Arabic "1"s. The dot to the left of the 1s is a n Arabic "0" and the character to the left of that looks like the top of a "2". So that would be "2011" reading left to right, but that makes no sense as because the Islamic calendar won't show their year 2011 until about the year 2600 AD!

So... it's either an Arabic 1102 (assuming they read right to left back then... I'm not sure if they did or didn't) which correlates to about 1690 AD.

OR

It's some other calendar such as "Ethiopian Era" (EE), Aji Saka (AS) which is Javanese, etc (although the coin doesn't look Ethiopian or Javanese etc)

OR

I'm completely upside down on the whole thing.

Take your pick.

If anyone can give a better answer, I'd like to hear it.

[Russellhome]

Robert

Thanks for your reply. Any information is helpful.

I've had this unknown coin for over 30 years. I'm not desperate to find out what this is. I just thought I'd see what I could find out. I did a little internet searching based on the hints you gave me -- and I'm glad I'm not desperate for info in this coin. Coins with similar size and crudeness were made for hundreds of years. A coin from the 1500's can look much the same as ones made in the 1800's. I think findng an exact match may take a lot of time.

Perhaps if I get snowed in this winter with no coins to search -- I'll see what I can do to track this one down. I'll update this post if I do find out anything.

[Dick]

I agree, the writing is from right to left, and the date is left to right. It has been 40, or 50 years since I tried to decipher the "Eastern calendars. There are many and none seem to have anything in common. We are the youngest nation to have a calendar that is ain its infancy. Many are in the 6000 year totals, and there is no real basis to accurately identify ythese coins. Even the ancient coin collectors, the ancient poman coins, the Greek, many others, to us are ancient, but in fact are barely in their "teens", by comparison. If anyone knows any of the mid-eastern Muslims, that might be you best bet, for a solution. BTW, the coin is right -side-up.
Dick

[Rhubarb]

Russell,

I've never seen a coin like that. That's nice. Thank's for showing it .

Rhubarb