Byzantine and Fatimid Egypt — eight hundred and seventy-five years of post-Roman coinage.
From Diocletian's currency reform of 296 CE — which closed the Alexandrian provincial mint and brought Egypt into the unified imperial coinage — through the Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Tulunid, Ikhshidid and Fatimid periods to the end of the Fatimid caliphate in 1171, Egypt's coinage moves from late-Roman bronze through Arab-Sasanian transitional issues into the great Islamic gold dinar tradition. The atlas's file inventories three hundred and twenty-eight specimens across this long span. Karim Bayoumi is the lead editor.
Five structural sub-periods.
The file is divided into five sub-periods following the political and monetary discontinuities. Late Roman and Byzantine (296 – 641 CE): the unified imperial folles and small bronzes, with Alexandria as a regular mint under Justinian and the seventh-century crisis emperors. Sixty-two specimens. Arab-Sasanian transitional (641 – 696 CE): the post-conquest fifty-year period when Egypt's coinage continued Byzantine types with bilingual Greek-Arabic legends and the diagnostic emirate of the early Umayyad period. Thirty-one specimens. Umayyad and Abbasid (696 – 868 CE): the introduction of the pure epigraphic gold dinar by Abd al-Malik in 696 and the establishment of Fustat as the Egyptian mint. Forty-eight specimens. Tulunid and Ikhshidid (868 – 969 CE): the Egyptian dynasties that struck their own dinars while nominally recognising Abbasid suzerainty. Twenty-nine specimens, the smallest sub-period in the file. Fatimid (969 – 1171 CE): the Cairo caliphate's gold dinars and silver dirhams across two hundred and two years, the file's largest sub-period at one hundred and fifty-eight specimens.
The reference standards used.
Karim Bayoumi attributes specimens in this file against four standard references and several supplementary ones. Goodacre (1928) Handbook of the Coinage of the Byzantine Empire for the Byzantine period material, with cross-reference to Sear (1987) Byzantine Coins and Their Values for the variant readings. Walker (1956) A Catalogue of the Arab-Byzantine and Post-Reform Umayyad Coins in the British Museum for the transitional period. Album (1998) A Checklist of Islamic Coins for the early Islamic series, with cross-reference to the Islamic Coin Auctions reference series for variant attribution. Lane-Poole (1879–1890) Catalogue of Oriental Coins in the British Museum Volume V on the Fatimids, and the more recent Balog (1981) work on the Fatimid coinage as the working primary reference for the period.
The Fatimid gold dinar — diagnostics and the file's emphasis.
The Fatimid gold dinar is the technical pinnacle of medieval Islamic numismatics. Struck to a remarkably stable weight standard of 4.25 g across two centuries, with extraordinary fineness (consistently above 22-carat purity in the assays Karim has been able to verify), and with the characteristic concentric epigraphic design that distinguishes Fatimid dinars from Abbasid and Umayyad predecessors. The file documents one hundred and four Fatimid gold dinars, drawn from the mints at Cairo, Alexandria, Mansuriya, Sicily-Palermo, Mahdia (modern Tunisia), and the brief minting at al-Mahsiyya. The mint readings on Fatimid dinars are usually unambiguous because the mint name is written in full on the reverse; the diagnostic challenges are the dynastic year-readings (Hijri calendar) and the imam-attributions where the dies are heavily worn.
Forgery — the Fatimid problem.
The Fatimid gold dinar is one of the most-forged medieval coins in the modern market, with at least three distinct workshops in Beirut, Damascus and Istanbul producing high-quality electrotype and pressed copies for sale through the antiquities market since the 1970s. Karim has identified twenty-three modern forgeries during the work on this file — pressed copies, electrotype reproductions, and four genuinely struck but post-dated specimens (modern dies impressing pre-modern weights of recovered gold). The forgery register includes detailed diagnostic notes for each; the most common diagnostic of pressed copies is the soft inner edge of the legend characters, where genuine die-strike impressions produce sharp edges that the pressing process cannot replicate.
The Fustat mint context.
Fustat, the original Arab garrison city founded south of modern Cairo in 641 CE, hosted the Egyptian Islamic mint from the early Umayyad period through the foundation of the new Fatimid capital at al-Qahira (Cairo proper) in 969. The mint then moved to the new city but Fustat continued as a major commercial centre until its destruction during the Crusader threat of 1168. The atlas's documentation of Fustat-mint specimens benefits from the extensive archaeological work at the Fustat site over the past century, which has produced the most precisely dated Islamic urban stratigraphy anywhere in the Mediterranean basin. The mint readings on Fatimid Cairo dinars are usually unambiguous (the mint name is written in full on the reverse) but the differentiation between Fustat-mint and Cairo-mint issues in the transitional decade 968-978 is one of the file's running attribution problems, with several specimens currently flagged as 'Fustat or al-Qahira mint, transitional period' pending a die-comparison study planned for 2026-27.
The companion file on Roman Egypt coinage covers the pre-reform centuries; the scarab seals corpus covers the parallel Pharaonic seal tradition. The atlas's attribution methodology applies across all files. The 2024 hoard report includes the small Fustat dinar hoard found during construction work near the medieval mint site.