AFGHANISTAN Ahmad Shah Durrani rupee 1765 AD Derajat mint

Description

Ahmad Shah was the founder of the Durrani dynasty. He started out as an agent of the Persian dictator Nadir Shah, whose empire fell apart after his assassination. A national council of elders (loya jurga) appointed Ahmad king of the new nation of Afghanistan. He proceeded to go conquering in all directions. He became a major power in the region.

The Durrani are an Afghan tribe of the Pashtun ethnos. One of them turned out to be a charismatic war leader who drove his tribe to dominance and expanded to all of Afghanistan and beyond. Dynastic succession practices were the typical unruly mess of normal human behavior, so wars between relatives and other clans were constantly breaking out.

Afghan history goes back to the paleolithic era. It started being Islamized in the 8th century AD. The borders have always been fluid. Invaders have come and gone. Local conquerors have burst out of Afghanistan into neighboring regions. Maybe a generation or two of peace here or there.

“Middle East” is, generally spealing, Morocco east to Afghanistan, Sudan in the south to Turkey in the north.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.