Recensio numorum Muhammedanorum (Fraehn)

The Recensio is the first volume of Christian Martin Fraehn's work on the Islamic coins held in the Asiatic Museum of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, printed by the Academy press in 1826. ¹ Its title says Fraehn interpreted and arranged the coins with prolegomena and a palaeographic, philological and historical commentary, adding copper plates of the more notable ones, and that this volume contains the review of all the Museum's coins with interpretations of their legends. ¹ It is dedicated to the Academy's president, Sergei Uvarov. ³

• Fraehn says he cannot tell for certain when and by whom the coins were gathered, but traces their beginnings to Peter the Great, who ordered antiquities and rarities collected, including finds from Siberian graves, and ordered the remains of the city of Bulghar on the Volga repaired. ^{2 4}
• Most of the older coins he found in the Museum were of the kinds dug up from Russian soil: caliphal coins and above all Samanid and Jochid (Golden Horde) ones; the later ones were mostly Indian, Turkish and Persian. ⁵
• Kehr was called from Leipzig in 1731 to interpret the Museum's oriental coins and wrapped each in a paper noting ruler, city and year, but Fraehn found him often badly wrong and discarded his interpretations. ^{6 7}
• In 1817, when the Academy entrusted him with examining, arranging and describing them after he left Kazan, the Museum's Islamic coins numbered about 19,800. ⁶
• The mass of duplicates slowed him: of some Samanid and Jochid coins he found a hundred, two hundred or over three hundred specimens, and by the end of 1817 he had set aside 14,574 duplicates. ⁸