Islamic Numismatics in Russian Turkestan (Imperial period, c. 1867-1917)

Abstract

The following brief survey deals with the numismatic activity in Russian Turkestan (later called Middle Asia) within the early colonial period from the annexation in the late 1860s and till the ‘October revolution’of 1917, reviewing a succession of related events and pointing at some most noticeable personalities in the field, both Russian and indigenous. Particular attention is paid to the public state of affairs, which triggered the rise of amateur collecting of antiquities in the region, aimed at search, study and market trade of medieval artefacts, including (perhaps basically) Islamic coins, and later forming the solid base for the development of advanced scholarly numismatics of medieval and pre-modern Central Asia in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.