Clive Foss is retired from teaching history at Georgetown University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he collects coins and writes on Byzantine and early Islamic history, archeology and numismatics.
When Arab Muslims came to rule formerly Byzantine lands in the mid-seventh century CE, they continued using local coins and only gradually issued their own: The story was similar in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia. Viewed through a numismatist’s magnifying glass, it was an age not only of conflict and change, but also of accommodation and pragmatism.
