Un lotto di monete quadrate nel Medagliere di Siracusa

The Archaeological Museum of Syracuse keeps an interesting lot of twenty square silver coins taken and purchased in 1926 by Paolo Orsi from ''a good hundred'' by an antique dealer that had presented them as discovered in Marsala (Trapani). These are anonymous Islamic silver dirhams with a particular square shape, issued by the Almohads in Spain and North Africa, between the mid-12 th and the second half of the 13 th century (1147-1269), and imitations struck in numerous mints of southern Europe (mostly in Spain, but also in France and Italy) to be used for trading with the Islamic world. In particular, the twenty specimens being studied in this work could all probably belong to this last typology, despite several discrepancies found on the weight and dimensions of some coins.