Watch List notes:

BUWAYHID, RUKN AL-DAWLA, Donative 10-dinars, al-Muhammadiya 362h. OBVERSE: In border: five broken annulets; Inmargin: bismillah duriba hadha al-dinar bi'l-Muhammadiya sanat ithnatayn wa sittin wa thalatha mi'a; Incentre: la ilaha illa Allah | wahdahu la sharik lahu | al-Muti' lillah Rukn | al-dawla abu 'Ali Buwayh. REVERSE: In border: five broken annulets; Inmargin: Muhammad rasul Allah arsulah bi'l-huda wa din al-haqq li-yuzhirahu 'ala al-din kullihi wa lau kariha al-mushrikun; Incentre: Allah ahad Allah | al-samad lam yalidu wa | lam yuladu wa lam yakunu | lahu kufu ahad. DIMENSIONS: 38.1mm diameter, 2.3mm thick. WEIGHT: 42.96g. REFERENCE: Treadwell Mu362Gb: 'The cataloguer of Sotheby's 19.4.94, 411 notes that a dinar of this date conforming in type to Mu362b...is known but does not give details.'. CONDITION: Minor marks on edge and in fields, otherwise good very fine or better and of the highest rarity. NOTE: THE EARLIEST SURVIVING ISLAMIC GOLD COIN OF THIS EXCEPTIONAL WEIGHT. The tradition of producing special coins and medallions of exceptional size goes back to the Classical period, and developed in the later Roman and Byzantine eras. Several Roman medallions weighing 10 aurei exist today and a Byzantine medallion of 36 solidi issued by Justinian I, formerly in the Bibliothèque Nationale, was stolen and melted in the nineteenth century. The biggest surviving medallions from the ancient world are Germanic imitations of Valentinian I (with Valens) and of Valens alone, of 48 and 72 solidi respectively. Larger pieces still are described by contemporary historians.; Inthe Islamic world, the practice of producing special coins appears to have begun under the caliph al-Rashid, but it was under al-Mutawakkil (232-247h) that donative gold and silver coins began to be issued more regularly and more formally. Their legends and weight were identical to regular currency coins, but the calligraphy was especially fine and the design was slightly modified so as to leave a wide, plain border around the legends themselves. Apart from making them stand out from regular coins, this would of course have permitted mounting without damage to the legends, and these donative issues are indeed commonly found pierced or with loops. Most of these special coins were either of standard weight or else fractional issues, the latter possibly meant to be scattered over the heads of the populace on ceremonial occasions, but larger pieces soon followed. A silver five-dirham piece dated 325h is known (Ilisch D III 24), and in 351h the Buwayhids struck a five-dinar piece weighing 21.65g at Baghdad (Ilisch DI 20 ). But the present piece appears to be the earliest 10-dinar coin known today, and no other Islamic gold coin of this weight is known for more than two centuries (Ilisch 49, dated 575h). Ibn al-Athir describes an astonishing coin of 1,000 dinars weight (equivalent to more than 4kg of gold!) struck by the Buwayhid Fakhr al-dawla at Jurjan in 378h, but if this ever existed we must assume it has long since been melted (from Ilisch, note to no. 22). The Buwayhids were from Daylam, a mountainous region in Northern Iran on the shores of the Caspian Sea. The founders of the dynasty, Rukn al-dawla (whose full name was Abu 'Ali al-Hasan) and his brother 'Imad al-dawla (Abu'l-Hasan 'Ali), both entered the services of the Samanid general Makan b. Kaki, but later switched their allegiance to Mardawij b. Ziyar. Mardawij was murdered in 323h, whereupon much of the territory formerly under his control fell to the Buwayhid brothers. They went on to consolidate and expand their position until Baghdad itself came under Buwayhid control in 334h. Establishing themselves as the caliph's 'protectors', they effectively ended his secular authority and reduced his role to a purely religious one. Much has been made of the Buwayhids' role in what has been termed the 'Iranian interlude', the period between the weakening of Arab ascendancy in Iran from the mid 3rd/9th century and the advent of Turkish dominance with the arrival of the Seljuqs in the mid 5th/11th. During the intervening two centuries several dynasties with Iranian origins, with the Buwayhids chief among them, began to revive aspects of Iranian culture and society from pre-Islamic times, and the coinage played an important part in this process. For example, the Buwayhids adopted the pre-Islamic title shahanshah, 'King of Kings', and their rulers themselves sometimes took Persian names. These titles found their way onto the coinage, where they appear alongside Arabic ones. A few exceptional types even reverted to pre-Islamic coinage types, including an impressive medallic piece made at al-Muhammadiya in 351h, where the present coin was also struck eleven years later. This type, an example of which was offered in these rooms nine years ago, has an obverse broadly similar to the present coin, but its reverse carries a facing Sasanian-style portrait of Rukn al-dawla himself flanked by honorific legends in Pahlawi. It is instructive to compare the two objects. The portrait piece (illustrated right) is described as a dirham in the mint/date formula, but in almost all other respects stands completely apart from the mainstream of Islamic coinage. It is cast (although it may have been cast from a struck original), and is made of silvered bronze rather than the fine silver of normal Buwayhid dirhams. Even the mint/date legend is unusual, with an additional phrase after the date which has been read as min hijra nabawiya ('in the Hijra of the Prophet'). The reverse, with its facing bust of Rukn al-dawla and Pahlawi legends, is entirely Persian in its iconography. Its weight of 14.26g is approximately correct for a five-dirham coin, but as a cast piece made of bronze it is difficult to say to what extent this is deliberate. Overall, while it may describe itself as a dirham, it looks much more like a portrait medal and it is perhaps best interpreted as an object presented by Rukn al-dawla to his courtiers as a badge of favour. It is very difficult to regard it as any kind of circulating coin. The present coin is entirely different. It is struck rather than cast, is made of fine gold rather than being plated, correctly describes itself as a dinar, and its weight is exactly correct for ten gold dinars. Its legends and design are clearly derived from Umayyad silver dirhams, even down to the five annulets in the border (although these are in fact slightly open rather than closed circles, possibly recalling the crescents in the borders of Sasanian drachms, from which the annulets on Umayyad dirhams are thought to have evolved). The only significant difference between the legends on the present coin and those on an Umayyad dirham is in the obverse field, which is slightly expanded and rearranged to accommodate the names of the caliph and Rukn al-dawla (Umayyad precious metal coins were entirely anonymous). It must be stressed that this is far from being an Iranian prototype. Umayyad dirhams were sometimes struck at mints in Iran, but much the most active Umayyad silver mint was at Wasit, in southern Iraq, with the other main Umayyad silver mint located at Damascus in Syria. The Umayyads themselves, of course, were Arabs rather than Persians, and these silver dirhams were introduced in the late 70s Hijri to replace the older, Arab-Sasanian drachms previously in use. All in all, it would be difficult to imagine an object of this period which looks more like a conventionally Arabic coin and less like a Persian commemorative medallion than the present piece. It has even been carefully made to the exact weight of ten dinars, as was a companion piece in silver struck to five dirhams' weight (Treadwell Mu362b = Sotheby's, 19 April 1994, lot 444). This piece was surely never intended for commercial use but, like earlier Abbasid donative dinars and dirhams of standard weight but with broad margins, it is still most certainly a coin and not a commemorative medallion. Why should such an imposing coin, struck at an Iranian mint at the height of Buwayhid power, have been so consciously Arabic in design? It must be remembered that however much the Buwayhids may have wished to portray themselves as an Iranian dynasty, they were part of a wider Islamic world in which secular power was bestowed by the Abbasid caliph, and were obliged to conform to the realities of the day. It is said that the Buwayhid rulers even felt it necessary to approach the caliph himself in order to receive the title of shahanshah. Prestige in Iran may have consolidated the Buwayhids' position there, but their formal authority depended on their remaining part of an Islamic world, not an Iranian one. Moreover, promoting themselves as the guardians and revivers of Iran's glorious past would have been much less popular in southern Iraq, which the Buwayhids also controlled, and especially in Baghdad itself where the Buwayhids kept the caliph under what was, effectively, house arrest. If the cast portrait medals were intended for a purely Iranian audience, coins such as the present piece, with their irreproachably correct and beautifully-engraved Arabic legends, belong to a wider Islamic world. There is no obvious historical event which stands out as a reason why this remarkable coin should have been struck, and it is perhaps naive to look for such a simple explanation. Earlier Abbasid donatives can seldom be associated with particular events, and it seems that some caliphs (notably al-Mutawakkil and especially al-Muqtadir) issued them primarily for presentation at court and to confer status upon the recipient. But the exceptional piece offered here is far more imposing than these caliphal issues, and such a magnificent donative would surely have been a worthy gift from Rukn al-dawla even to the caliph himself, with the related silver 'twin' perhaps given to his courtiers.

Estimate: £300,000-500000