Early Stamp With Arabic Or Farsi Script

Any help on this mysterious stamp The upper central area has an image of a castellated tower with crossed cannons below. Looks familiar. Indian feudatory states possible, but I can't see it anywhere.


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Could you please post better link ?

Peter

Fixed...and welcome
Don

It's from Afghanistan, from the 1890s. The tower and all is the coat of arms at the time.

Great ! One of the two stamps I am missing . Black on yellow .

I tried like heck to find old Afghani stamps when I was living there and it was just about impossible. Same goes for Iraq. Not even fakes. Maybe the fake t-shirts, Chinese Marlboro cigarettes, exploding "Bic" lighters and thumb drives/software loaded with viruses kept them busy. I did get to buy bootleg DVD's of Hollywood movies months before they were at movie theaters. The quality sucked and every so often a person's head would pop up in the scene because they were filmed in an early release movie theater for the troops. But I digress...…...

Afgan is like Tibet you get one or two stamp auctions once every 10 years and you got to bid high ,because everything is held in a few major collections .

Hi pisumcorporum,

It would be great to get a firm ID for this stamp.

Is there any chance you could post a clearer scan?

I believe it's an Afghan revenue stamp.

The overall design and inscription look similar to designs in the old Forbin catalogue though the illustrations are poor.

While it looks like most of the Afghan postage stamps of the period a few elements are different:

- There isn't a long curved line under the circle with the coat of arms.

(This line is on all these designs apart from the the unissued black on green registration stamp (SG type R18 / Scott #F2)).

- There are many more floral patterns filling space than on the regular postage stamp designs.

- It appears to have the date 1312 at the top right.

Thank you. Afghanistan it is. I will try to make a larger/clearer scan. I am also aware, that like Tibet, there are quite likely a lot of forgeries around. This looks OK to an unpracticed eye, but an expert might have a different opinion! Watch this space for a better effort.