Henri Lavoix

Henri Lavoix was assistant curator in the Department of Medals, Engraved Stones and Antiquities of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris and the author of its catalogue of Islamic coins, whose volume on the eastern caliphs appeared in 1887. ¹

• He holds that Abd al-Malik's reform, by subjecting coinage throughout the empire to one law and one weight and freeing it from foreign imitation, created a "national coinage", and that it was both a measure of financial administration and a political act. ²
• He corrects the statement he cites from Ibn Khaldun that Abd al-Malik put his name on dinar and dirham: the purely Islamic coins do not bear it, and what was recalled and restruck was not the coinage of paganism but the coins that had circulated in the empire for more than fifty years. ²
• He argues that the coin itself must be the guide in studying the beginnings of Islamic coinage, since in his view historical criticism is lacking in the eastern writers on this subject, and praises Henri Sauvaire's collection and translation of the Arabic texts on coinage. ³
• He suggests that the images on some early fulus of the Maghrib and al-Andalus, such as the ear of wheat and the tunny fish, derive from ancient coins of Baetica and Mauretania Tingitana. ⁴