Ricerc@Sapienza

The Proceedings of the 5th Simone Assemani Symposium on Islamic coins collect the various contributions with the unifying subject proposed for the meeting: Islamic money in the archaeological contexts (Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Tajikistan, Poland, on the plains of western Russia and in Georgia, Sicily or Spain), problems, methods, documentary value for the economic history from the Umayyad period to the Mamluks. The numismatic documentation should be also the outcome of recent investigations in the archives, i.e. the project “Fontes Inediti Numismaticae Orientalis”, acronym FINO.

The role of Oluf Gerhard Tychsen in Islamic numismatic research cannot be properly evaluated unless we examine the entire net of studies and scholars of the same subject at his time: the main characters of our paper, and indeed of the entire beginning of Islamic numismatics, are Tychsen himself (1734–1815), Cardinal Stefano Borgia (1731–1804), Georg Adler (1756–1834), and, some- how marginal but influential, the forger Giuseppe Vella (1749–1814).