assay and refining of gold in the post-medieval Islamic world: Potential and reality

Abstract

This paper describes the analysis of the Moroccan gold coins, jewellery and ingots from the 17th-century Salcombe Bay Treasure. Their trace element content gives information on the likely provenance of the gold and their fineness gives information on both quality control and refining methods. These can be compared to the methods described in the contemporary Al-asdāf al-munfadda can ahkām cilm sancat addīnār wal-fidda, an important Moroccan treatise on gold assay and refining, complied by al-Djaznā’ī. The treatise is both technical and practical and relates specifically to gold coins, jewellery and ingots. The methods outlined in the treatise are compared with other contemporary descriptions from Europe and India.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.