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ALMATY -
TOWN AND MINT DATING BACK TO THE 13th CENTURY[1]
One day (I remember it was late in September 1979), a lady visited the Archaeological Museum in Alma Ata and showed me two crudely struck silver coins with barely legible Arabic inscriptions, resembling the Chaghatayid post-reform dirhams of the late 13th century. The woman said that they had come from a small hoard, to her estimation, «perhaps ten to twelve pieces», excavated in that same year during earthworks in the Alma Ata Frontier School courtyard and divided among the school officers. However, when I asked her to point out the holders of the rest of the coins she knew, in order to attempt assembling the hoard, or at least sell me her own specimens, she for an unknown reason flatly refused everything and even did not allow me to retain her coins for study[2].
As I remember, both coins belonged to the same unknown type. Each
one of them was adorned with a couple of tamghas, one of which, representing an
oblong г-like sign crossed in the middle with a short straight dash 
, had
been common for the anonymous Chaghatayid regular coinage of Mawarannahr and
Turkestan in the course of the reform of Mas‛ud Beg[3] (mostly within AH 670–706)[4]. The second tamgha, looking like a trident with uneven prongs, one
ending with a loop, and an annulet at the opposite «handle» end 
, was
quite unfamiliar to me.
Since the coin inscriptions were no longer legible because of their low minting quality and fair condition, I could provide nothing but general conclusions about the approximate time and dynastic affiliation of the emission, as well as its definite relation to local monetary circulation.
The latter fact, though self-evident, bearing in mind the place where the coins have been found, seems to be most important, because the mentioned Frontier School is located upon the remnants of a spacious mediaeval settlement, the upper layers of which, together with the surrounding vicinity, according to former archaeological inspections and material findings (including coins), can with confidence be dated back to the Chaghatayid period[5]. Based on all that information, I dared make a very careful suggestion that the mentioned coins could have been struck at some as yet unknown local mint in Semirechye[6].
Ten years later when I already worked in the Moscow Institute for Oriental Studies, my old friend from Alma Ata, amateur numismatist Dr. Vladimir V. Dubinin presented to me a silver coin with the same tamghas, which he had purchased a while ago in the local coin market. He also told me that the owner (probably an aged serviceman) had got two more similar pieces of worse condition and that the coins had been allegedly found somewhere in Alma Ata.
The piece I obtained that way was certainly not one of the coins I had seen before. Naturally, after ten years I could not remember those examples in every detail, but they definitely had rather thick uneven flans and white silver colour, meanwhile the newly obtained coin had almost regular edges, it was considerably thinner and perhaps broader than those ones, and covered with unpleasant greenish-grey patina. It also had preserved the date indication which I first interpreted as … É°@Y ÉÄ@m ‘year <…> five (?)’ presumably distorted by abridgment through lack of space. The mint name (more exactly, the space on the coin where it ought to be placed), however, had been weakly struck or entirely effaced.
1. Silver dirham. Diameter 22-24 mm, weight 1.73g. Heavy die weakness at one edge, Av. slightly off-centre.
Av. In the round field inside a plain line circle — tamgha [1] in the middle (accepted as put in a vertical position), tamgha [2] to the left, a pair of slanted parallel lines to the right; several thick dots or «pearls» dispersed without any order between the described signs. Outside the circle is a fragment of weakly struck and mostly effaced Kufic legend:
… [É]¼»A 7A
Èf@ [»A 7] [There is no Go]d but All[ah] …
Rev. In the square field: two-line inscription in ornamented Kufic:
[Â]¥¨ 7 / A
¹¼À»A The greatest sovereign
Outside is another Kufic legend (with small undotted letters) forming the inner square:
É°Y
ÉÄm /…
/… / ÊhÈIjy
This [dirham] has been struck /… /… / year
É°@Y (?)
The next step towards the discovery took place several years later in Frunze (now Bishkek, Kirghizia) where my old friend G. I. Velichko told me about a Chaghatayid silver hoard found some time before in the Kurdai pass some 150 km to the west of Alma Ata. He had managed to browse the content of the hoard before it was brought away somewhere by its owners. According to his words, at least three coins of that hoard ought to be kindred to my specimen, for they bore the same trident-like tamgha together with the first common sign, also placed either on one side or separately. Unfortunately, while examining the coins he had not been able to decipher the Arabic legends on them, so he got no idea of the mint name(s). By then I had studied almost all available literature on the Chaghatayid coinage and many hundreds of real coins, so the absolute rarity of the discerned specimens and the restricted area of their spread left hardly any doubt as to their local origin. To say more, by then I already felt intuitively that their mint ought to have been localized just in the region of Alma Ata.
Finally, in 1990 one of my hobby-mates from Moscow A. A. Koifman (now in Israel) showed me two more coins with the same tamghas acquired from a visitor «from the South» — supposedly from Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan. They were different in general appearance from each other and, as far as I could give credence to my memory, from all other pieces I had seen before. One of them was badly obliterated and did not lend itself to any closer attribution, except for its external likeness to those I had already known; but the second one…
Now I could make a long and pictorial description of my trail-blazer’s excitement and joy when I saw what it really turned out to be, but I presume the description of the coin will be no less eloquent.
2. Silver dirham. Diameter 22 mm, weight 1.87g. Several die weakness spots, slight effacement, both sides a bit off-centre.
Av. In the field: tamgha [1] with six «pearls» around the central dash and two symmetrical knotted vignettes on both sides. Kufic legend beginning and ending with the same knot-like sign between ordinary linear circles:
iBÈ f@´»A f@YAÌ»A ɼ»
¹¼À»A z
z The power [belongs] to Allah, the One, the Omnipotent!
Rev. In the field: tamgha [2] ornated with «pearls» and vignettes like on Av. Circular legend with undotted Naskh-like script in similar setting (between line circles):
f°@Y ÉÄ@m ÌN@À»A
f¼@JI Á@Çif»A Êh@Ç Ljy
This dirham has been struck
at Balad Almatû [in] year f°@Y (?)
Three ornamental «pearls» in line above ÉÄ@m .
Despite rather fair condition of the specimen, all its inscriptions are clearly legible, some points only require a brief comment.
Using grammatically wrong feminine Êh@Ç before Á@Çif»A instead of correct masculine Ah@Ç is rather common throughout the Mongol coinage of Central Asia. The reason for this formal abuse, however, may not be just insufficient Arabic literacy of coin type-designers or die-cutters, as is generally explained in similar cases, but rather an effect of certain novations emerging in the Islamic coinage of that epoch: as early as the 2nd quarter of the 13th century, some Central Asian mints had set to produce coins (mainly broad-flan silvered copper dirhams and their fractions) on which a standard locution Á@Çif»A Ah@Ç ‘this dirham’ was replaced by its plural equivalent — Á@ÇAif»A Êh@Ç ‘these dirhams’; shortly after, most of them returned to the traditional singular formula, but sometimes they habitually went on cutting instead of the pronoun Ah@Ç its plural form Êh@Ç coinciding with the feminine one.
The word f¼I [balad] (grammatically a collective plural of Ñf¼I) has various meanings: ‘town; province; district; country’, and as such, it can point at the regional, rather than municipal character of the emission. In the proper sense, Chaghatayid uniform silver coinage of the period between the reforms of Mas‛ud Beg and Kepek (Kibäk) Khan, perhaps like most of other silver emissions in the history of coin circulation, was more intended to serve the trade between cities that inside them, or actually throughout the state, irrespective of the place of its minting. On the other hand, as far as we can judge, in most cases the mint names coincided with those of the appropriate cities, often together with their rural or pasturage environs. The only exclusions could be if regional denominations were different from urban ones. For instance, the toponyme al-Shâsh placed on Abbasid, Tahirid, Samanid, Qarakhanid and Chaghatayid coins was never a town name, but it denoted the whole region (in some periods even two adjacent ones — al-Shâsh and Îlâq), the main towns of which, also named on the coins, were successively Binkath, Banâkath (or Fanâkath), Shâhrukhîyah and Tâshkand. Likewise, there were coins struck simultaneously at Farghânah (the region) and Akhsîkath (its main town), Îlâq and Tûnkath[7], Pârâb and Otrâr[8], etc. In our case the name Almatû must be common for the town and its vicinity.
The Mint Name
The word ÌN@À»A and the whole coin legend have been engraved without dots (disregarding the decorative «pearls» above ÒÄ@m), but taking into consideration all the above, may there remain whatever doubt in its reading this way?
Beginning with 1854, when a Russian fortress Vernoe (‘the Reliable’) had been built near a small village Almaty and a new colonial settlement had started to grow up, its name Verny kept on being connected with that stronghold, until as late as 1921 it was renamed into Alma Ata. The native population of the town have never accepted this name, since it represented a strange artificial remaking of the genuine appellation with a meaning rather preposterous in Kazakh — something like ‘grandfather of apples’ or ‘apple saint’. The original Kazakh name for Alma Ata now and ever sounds like [almatï] — the form ascending to the Qypchaq phonetic standard and fixed in the written sources at least since the early 16th century, namely in Bâbur Nâmah by Zahîr al-Dîn Muhammad Bâbur (1483-1530) and Ta’rîkh-i Rashîdî by Mîrzâ Muhammad Haidar Dughlât (killed in 1551)[9].
The very Kazakh term almatï means ‘apple’ as an adjective (namely ‘Apple [place]’ or ‘Apple [country]’), alma being the root and =tï the relative suffix. An objection might be expressed as against the last letter in the Arabic-written version, while Ð seems to fit the phonetic property of the final vowel better than Ë . To stand this spelling, I can simply remind a most convincing example from the coinage of Mengli Giray Khan at Kaffa (Crimea), where the same Turkic suffix (more exactly, its soft allomorph) =lî/lü appears on the coins of year AH886 in both graphic forms at will — ̼¸Ä¿ and ϼ¸Ä¿ [10], which prove to be equivalent for the name uttered like Mäñg[ü]lü. One can remind more analogies, like ÆÌ@N»A altûn and ÅÎ@N»A altïn ‘gold’ sometimes quite arbitrarily met with in the same source, but the cited examples reflecting the phenomenon that is rather common for all Turkic languages, seem to be enough to consider the pronounciation [almatï] of the toponyme in its graphic form ÌN@À»A not only acceptable, but in our case perhaps solely normative.
Mint Dates
Both of the described coins have rather well preserved the segments where the dates ought to be placed: É°@Y ÉÄ@m and f°@Y ÉÄ@m respectively. At first glance (and reasoning from all we know about coin dating in mediaeval Muslim Asia) they both resemble a distorted o@À@a or Òn@À@a (for ‘<…> five’), looking as if a mere truncation has taken place because of the miscalculation of space during die engraving, which would be completed with presumably lacking parts of the legends like Òn@À@a/o@À@a ÒÄ@m [ÒÖBÀN@mË <…>Ë] year [6]x5 and thus render one of the following dates — 675, 685 or 695 AH, as I had with clear conscience considered until recently[11]. But one day the obvious diversity between these almost similar, but still different graphic elements in what ought to be parts of mint years, suddenly struck me, and I clearly saw full dates on both coins! Moreover, they were different, though adjacent, but shown neither with numeral words nor with figures.
It is commonly known that every letter of the Arabic alphabet has its numerical value (the so-called f@VIA Abjad order, where letter A alif equals to 1, L bâ = 2, X ğîm = 3, e dâl = 4, Ê hâ = 5 and so forth), and every word or group of words can be represented in this way as a certain number. The art of composing chronograms (Arab. cÍiDM ta’rîkh, or meaningful phrases and expressions, especially in rhymes, the sum of the numerical values of the letters in each of them comprising a certain enciphered year) was widely spread and highly rated throughout the mediaeval Muslim world. We normally meet the ta’rîkh compositions in old manuscripts of historical or biographical contents, there even exist specialized selections and guidebooks on chronograms, but several cases of using them as the dates on coins are also known. In particular, one of the most famous examples thereof is an Arabic expression ©³Ë BÀί jÎb»A ‘the Benefaction [be] in what has happened’ placed on the silver and gold coins of Iranian mints dated 1148-1150 AH (1735-1737 AD), in which the total of numerical values of all 12 letters amounts to 1148 — the accession date of Nadir Shah Afshar as supreme ruler[12].
Another example, less known but standing much closer to our coins in time and space, can be observed in one of the earliest types of anonymous Jujid silver dirhams struck at Khorezm, where a meaningless word-like graphic unit ¡n@a [13] (numerical values of the letters: d = 600, p = 60, ¢ = 9), being preceded by Arabic ÒÄ@m ‘year’, represents an indisputable chronogram deciphered as 669 AH (1270-71 AD).
Moreover, quite lately a numismatist from Nizhny Novgorod V. P. Lebedev who I had informed a while before about my observations of this phenomenon, managed to find at least three more evidences of ta’rîkh dating in the early Jujid coinage of Khorezm — ̨@a ÒÄ@m = ‘year 676’ and Saray — l¨@a = ‘677’ and ÌÄ@a = ‘656’[14]. Both samples of the Saray dirhams, however, are slightly dubious: the former one because of graphic distortions and lack of the proper sign for the letter k , with the dot above it being only present; the latter one — as to the spelling of the ambiguously shaped middle sign — rather @Ä@ nûn = 50, but not improbable @¨@ ‛ain = 70 or @°@ fâ = 80. Properly, were the spellings in these two cases right or wrong, all these examples cannot be anything but mint dates, so that I definitely consider V. P. Lebedev’s communication as a new and most solid confirmation of my following version.
Ergo, if we take the undotted units f°@Y and É°@Y on our coins for the ta’rîkh dates and precise them through replacing ` h.â = 8 with d khâ = 600, i.e. ideate them as f°@a and É°@a respectively, we shall obtain the year figures for AH 684 (= AD 1285) and 685 (= AD 1286). This chronological interpretation turns out to be consistent with any other particularities of the described coins and all available data relative to the uniform silver emissions in the Chaghatayid state of the last quarter of the 13th century: diameter and weight, general appearance and design, stylistic features, presence of the state tamgha and that of a local owner, as well as all known mint dates on the coins of the appropriate emissions struck in other places.
Conclusions
In this manner we can state the existence of one more Chaghatayid mint — Almaty, in addition to the 16 known and at least two still unpublished ones, which were either reactivated or newly established to provide enough coinage in the course the monetary reform initiated by Mas‛ud Beg in the Chaghatayid khanate about 670/1271-72. All we have learned about the dirhams of Almaty — in particular, their absolute rarity on the one hand, and duration of minting on the other, although short but evidently not on one occasion only (which is proved by their die and even type variety), indicate that the local emission was intended mainly, if not exceptionally for supplying the regional market that was remote and separated from the most of other economic centres of the state. The latter, in fact, explains why the coins in question have never been met, neither solitary nor in hoards, outside the region of Almaty situated far on the north-eastern borders of the traditional cultural areas of Mawarannahr.
In the aspect of cultural history the coins of Almaty make a certain contribution to the study of sophisticated Mongol heraldry, representing a new sign of property; in all probability, it must belong to a next of kin to the Ulus Khan, one of the Mongol noyons who then ruled over that part of the state. Tamgha [2], resembling to some extent the signs [4] and [5] on the coins of Taraz (according to E. A. Davidovich[15]), still cannot be associated with any certain owner, but its use has been strictly localized and exactly dated[16]. Another important aspect of the newly found coins is the unusual and seldom encountered Abjad manner of mint dating: once fixed in the Arabic-written coin legends dating back to the 13th century, it provides further researchers a reliable precedent for the solution of similar problems that they might face making out other mediaeval Muslim coins.
The discovery of the Chaghatayid mint of Almaty, alongside with its paramount numismatic importance, allows us to deduce more inferences of certain historical value. First of all, the name ÌN@À»A placed on the coin from the late 13th century can be actually taken for the earliest known record of this toponyme applicable to today’s Almaty. So far the same has been believed to be mentioned in Bâbur Nâmah by Zahîr al-Dîn Bâbur (1483–1530) who cited «Almâlîq, Almâtû and Yângî, the name of which is written in the books as Tarâzkent» as well-known towns (iÜj@È@q) northwards of Ferghana and by his time destroyed by the Mongols and Uzbeks[17]. In the other part of the same work Bâbur mentioned 914/1508 as the exact date of a battle «in Almatû — that renowned locality in Moghulistan». The same event was also reported in Ta’rîkh-i Rashîdî by Bâbur’s cousin, Mîrzâ Muhammad Haidar (killed in 1551) whose information thereon[18] is unlikely to have been quite independent of his prominent kinsman’s one.
Since then, we have no informative references to this settlement or its vicinity until the middle of the last century. That it continued to exist as a country unit, or at least never ceased to be inhabited by a more or less constant population, witnesses its very name, remaining immutable during the seven last centuries. In other words, there was no need for the name of the town to resurrect if it had never died: the ancient name Almatû has emerged here in the 13th century or even earlier, and today’s Almaty must be regarded as its firsthand, legal and plenipotentiary inheritor.
From the above reasoning it must be stated with certainty that Almaty, or Alma Ata of late, the newly resigned capital of Kazakhstan (in favour of an almost fameless prairie borough Aqmola = Astana), is not 150 years old, as it follows from its «official» chronology, but its history dates back at least to 720 years, as is testified by the new exactly dated numismatic sources, the most ancient for the moment and well worthy of confidence. Moreover, as I have noticed before, other archaeological findings from the region (including coins) reliably prove its still earlier existence in the capacity of an urban unit, at least since the Qarakhanid period (late 10th – early 13th centuries); so it will hardly be a great surprise if a coin is found some day, which will confidently date Almaty back to the whole millennium[19].
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