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Redistribution networks and early medieval geography of Arab silver: A case-study
Last modified: 2011-02-14
Abstract
After several decades of research results, one is still puzzled by the complexity related to the Northern European import of Arab silver, in form of minting, as jewelry, or simply as hack-silver. In the period of only two centuries (800-1020 AD) many thousand of coins were transferred to Northern Europe including first and foremost European Russia. In zhis paper, the attempt is made to correlate the minting place and year of each issue of Arab dirhams to the place of its discovery and present the results in a concise spatial analysis that juxtaposes geographical information from historical sources to the information inherent to each minting issue. The aim of this large-scale correlation is to reveal the intrinsic spatial knowledge of minting issues that may help in the reconstruction of early medieval exchange networks linking the Arab world as the driving center of civilization with ´barbarian´Northern Europe through the vast Russian plains.