The Proceedings of the 5th Simone Assemani Symposium on Islamic coins collect the various contributions with the unifying subject proposed for the meeting: Islamic money in the archaeological contexts (Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Tajikistan, Poland, on the plains of western Russia and in Georgia, Sicily or Spain), problems, methods, documentary value for the economic history from the Umayyad period to the Mamluks. The numismatic documentation should be also the outcome of recent investigations in the archives, i.e. the project “Fontes Inediti Numismaticae Orientalis”, acronym FINO. The opening of a line of research on the history of collecting and studies of Islamic numismatics should strive for an interdisciplinary approach beyond merely classificatory aspects and at the same time a sort of resistance to the danger of considering the numismatics of the Islamic world as secondary, marginal, with respect to the money of the “classical” world. The confirmation of an undeclared inter-disciplinarity appears, e.g., in the paper The Nani Collection of Arabic Coins through unpublished documents & drawings by Jean François Champollion (1790-1832).
