Pre-Islamic Coinage of Eastern Arabia

A presentation of the various indigenous coin issues that circulated in Eastern Arabia during the pre-Islamic era as attested in five private collections studied by the author. The basis for the classification is a corpus of 529 coins selected from those collections for publication here. Geographically, the coins came from two distinct regions which today comprise the Eastern Province of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirate of Umm al-Qaiwain in the United Arab Emirates. Foreign issues were rare in these areas, although a handful of Sasanian, Roman, Seleucid, Greek, Phoenician, Nabataean, Elymaean, Parthian and Sabaean coins have been attested to in the collections that form the basis of this work.