Help Identifying/Translating Turkish or Arabic? Writing on Artifact

June 22, 2016 6:32 AM

I volunteer in an archaeological lab and sometimes people bring in things they find in their yards or on the beach. A woman brought in this spoon that she found buried in her yard. None of us here have any idea what it is other than it is a spoon.

There seems to be writing on it, and it has been posited that it could be a coin that had a handle soldered on. Pictures here! I'm hoping somebody here can help us out because we are stumped as this isn't normally the sort of thing we work with.

posted by jenjenc to Society & Culture (4 answers total)

Interesting to compare it with these Islamic gemstone spoons, especially the fourth image.
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:14 AM on June 22, 2016

Best answer: Aha, a Turkish coin spoon? From here. Additional examples.
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:17 AM on June 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Awesome, thanks, MonkeyToes! This gives us a great starting point. We will forward on this link Turkish coin spoons to the finder! Usually I work with glass, pottery, Dutch clay pipes from the 18th century so this has been a nice change.
posted by jenjenc at 8:02 AM on June 22, 2016

The digits in the third picture kind of look like they say 1857, but I'm not sure about the third digit - it doesn't exactly match the list of Ottoman Turkish digits I'm looking at.
posted by xris at 3:22 PM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]