Middle Eastern Coins

Middle Eastern coins often carry two calendars on the same surface — the Western date and the Islamic Hijri date, side by side — and that duality extends through every layer of the region's numismatic history. Coins from the Ottoman Empire circulated alongside colonial issues from the British and French mandates, and the currencies that replaced them after independence were often struck at European mints for newly sovereign kingdoms and republics still building their own institutions.
 
The coins in this collection come from a region where ancient trade routes, modern borders, and competing calendar systems meet on a single denomination. The imagery ranges from Hashemite crowns to Pahlavi lions, from Ataturk's profile to the calligraphic precision of Arabic script denominations that read right to left on coins designed to circulate left to right through a global economy.
 
What connects them is the weight of the history relative to the age of the states. Most modern Middle Eastern nations are less than a century old. The minting traditions they inherited — and the scripts they write their denominations in — are thousands of years older than the borders that contain them.