Financial instruments of the past

This lesson asks you to identify a past or current financial situation and explain how it can inform financial decisions. The museum describes two instruments of the past and does not explain the decisions they guided; drawing out the decision and the related mathematics is your work with your class. ¹

Read the description and draw a simple diagram of the parties, places and amounts. Then ask what each party knows before deciding.

Read what the record says of the sakk. Hasan Ibrahim Hasan says in Tarikh al-Islam that the sakk is much like today's cheque. He cites al-Khwarizmi in Mafatih al-ulum that it gathered the names of those entitled to payment, their number, and what each was due ². The caliph, sultan or prince then signed at its foot to authorise payment of these stipends ². As the record gives it, one paper carried the names, the number and the sums, and one signature at the foot authorised payment. The same author adds that the word is still used in European languages ².

The record presents both instruments as Hasan Ibrahim Hasan presents them in Tarikh al-Islam, and cites this one book for them ². For what the sakk gathered he cites al-Khwarizmi, so a student reads one author's report of another's description, not a sakk. His comparison with the cheque and his remark about European words are what the record carries on how the instrument relates to later ones; it adds nothing more.

Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: is calling the sakk "much like today's cheque" a good way to learn what it was, given that the record describes one paper naming those entitled and what each was due, signed at its foot by a ruler?

• The sakk and the hawala: the record this lesson reads, with the second instrument.
• Hawala, the transfer of a debt: how the jurists' encyclopaedia defines the word hawala.
• Nizam al-Mulk: the vizier whose bills of exchange the record mentions.

Read The sakk and the hawala. Compare the sakk with a cheque of today in a two-column table: what is similar and what differs.