Abstract

The brevity and fragmentation of written sources on the history of ancient and medieval states very ofen forces scholars to employ additional materials, in particular numismatic ones. Numismatics, closely related to other auxiliary historical disciplines, arts, toponymics, and paleography, can serve as an important source for studying the past. According to numismatic materials, one can judge about changes in the issue and circulation of coins in the cities of the Caucasus in the Middle Ages, the system of its trade routes and communications; they can be used to study many important issues of socio-economic and political history. Coins of the Sassanids, Umayyads, Abbasids, Bagratids, Sajids, Safavids, Sheddadids, Shirvanshahs, Ilkhanids, Jalayirids and other rulers of the East attracted the attention of Russian and foreign oriental numismatists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Among them are Kh.D. Fren, P.S. Savel’yev, V.V. Grigor’yev, V.G. Tiesenhausen, A.K. Markov, R.R. Vasmer, I. Bartolomey, B. Dorn, M.A. Dobrynin, A.A. Bykov et al. A new milestone in the development of Caucasian numismatics was the research on the structure of monetary circulation in Transcaucasia attempted by the famous collector and numismatist Evgeny Aleksandrovich Pakhomov (1880-1965) on the basis of coin hoards. Along with the coins minted in the administrative and trade centers of the Sassanian Empire, Byzantium, the Arab Caliphate and other medieval states, E.A.Pakhomov describes the coins that were minted in the medieval states in the Caucasus. Tey testify to advanced commodity-money relations. The expansion of commodity-money relations in the antique and medieval Caucasus contributed to the further development of handicraf production, which is also evidenced by medieval written sources.