Material
An Empress, Coffee, and a Dowry
ريال الماريا تيريزا
The coin that paid for Mocha coffee came back, melted down, as a necklace or a scabbard. Here is how the Maria Theresa thaler became the silver of Yemen.
An Empress, Coffee, and a Dowry
The silver of Yemeni jewellery has an unexpected origin: a coin struck with the likeness of Maria Theresa of Austria. The thaler bearing her name, issued without interruption since 1741, long served as a trusted currency in Red Sea trade. It was through coffee that the coin arrived in Yemen in quantity: the port of Mocha exported its famous beans, and merchants wanted to be paid in this stable silver currency.
A Currency Become Raw Material
For the silversmith, the thaler was not only silver: it was a silver of known, regular fineness, around four-fifths pure metal. At Sanaa especially, it was melted down to draw the material for jewellery. So the coin that paid for the coffee came back — melted and beaten — as a necklace or a janbiya scabbard. Currency became dowry.
The Grades of Silver
Not all Yemeni silver was of the same purity. The finest silver, reserved for the best pieces, ran to roughly 85 to 92 per cent; next came a lighter silver, mixed with copper, for everyday use and rural commissions; and lower still, a metal called “half” — half silver, half copper. The grade thus followed the purse of whoever placed the order.
Why It Matters to the Collector
Understanding this economy helps in reading a piece: a high, regular grade points to an urban prestige commission, a poorer alloy to rural use. And the very variability of the grade, from one piece to the next, is a sign of authenticity: it speaks of a workshop melting down its own material, where industrial production would have made it uniform.
The Coin That Crossed Half the World
The Maria Theresa thaler outlived the empress whose effigy it bore. Struck without interruption to the same 1780 design, it became one of history’s great trade coins, accepted from the Red Sea to the Horn of Africa and deep into Arabia where local rulers’ coinage was distrusted.1 Yemen drew it in through the coffee of Mocha; from there it passed into the hands of silversmiths, who valued it less as money than as a dependable block of fine metal.
The Silver That Travelled Back Out
The journey did not end in the workshop. When silver fell from fashion in the mid-twentieth century and the Jewish community departed, a great mass of finished jewellery made the reverse trip — melted back into bullion, its weight in silver sold in the markets of Jeddah and beyond, the thaler-metal returning to ingot once more.2 What survived this second melting did so largely because collectors and museums recognised, before the bullion dealers did, that an old labba or a signed scabbard was worth more whole than weighed.
What a Thaler-Silver Piece Is Worth Today
For the collector, an object whose silver still carries the regular, coin-derived fineness of the old workshops is doubly eloquent: it dates and places the commission, and it testifies to a vanished economy. The highest values now attach to early, securely dated pieces — especially those signed by known masters or stamped with an imam’s hallmark — precisely the works that escaped the crucible.3
Notes
1 On the Maria Theresa thaler as a trade coin and its circulation in Arabia and the Red Sea, see Ransom, Silver Treasures from the Land of Sheba.
2 On the melting of jewellery for bullion and its sale in Jeddah after 1950, see Ransom, Silver Treasures, and Wagner, Jews and Islamic Law in Early 20th-Century Yemen.
3 On the premium for early, dated and hallmarked pieces, see the catalogue of the Israel Museum’s Treasures of Yemenite Silverwork.
Select Sources
Ransom, Marjorie. Silver Treasures from the Land of Sheba: Regional Yemeni Jewelry. Cairo: AUC Press, 2014.
Wagner, Mark S. Jews and Islamic Law in Early 20th-Century Yemen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Treasures of Yemenite Silverwork (exhibition). 2015.