Coins of Arab Sind and Multan

Abstract

The period from Muhammad Qasim's siege of Deybul (AD 711) to the conquest of Mahmud of Ghazni (before AD 1030) is the first time that Muslim rulers exercised more than temporary authority over a part of the subcontinent. The coinage of this period is particularly important to its reconstruction but the principle catalogues (Goron & Goenka; Album 2011) are sparsely illustrated which can make the identification of coins difficult. The Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge has its collection online but the holdings are modest and not broadly representative. The museums of Rajasthan have digitised more than 7000 coins but the database while a powerful research tool is not user friendly. The British Museum has recently made its collection available online and this article is a brief introduction to that resource. Previous curators, Nicholas Lowick and Joe Cribb, made considerable advances in the study of these coins but much of this material has not previously been published. The digitisation was only possible as Joe Cribb kindly providing his unpublished research on the coins of Multan and Sind.