During the archaeological excavations of the Taraz settlement, a large collection of medieval coins was obtained. To date, the funds of the Republican state historical and cultural reserve-museum "Monuments of ancient Taraz" have received more than 1,800 coins and their fragments, representing a unique numismatic material that reveals the history of the development of political, commodity-monetary and cultural relations in the Central Asian region. In 2015, a hoard of coins was found, which consists of 183 pieces.

Taraz is an ancient city located at the intersection of the caravan roads of the "Great Silk road". "City of merchants" - as Taraz has long been called-this capital center of the Turgesh, and then the Karluks and Karakhanids, where for many centuries there was a mint that minted coins on behalf of the supreme rulers.

According to the results of archaeological work on the ancient settlement of Taraz and in its district, scientists determined that at the end of the 7th – 8th centuries, imported Chinese coins of the Tang dynasty were used in circulation. Thus, Chinese coins in the early middle ages became a kind of currency on the Great Silk road. But at the beginning of the 8th century, the imported coins in commodity-money regional relations became insufficient and the Turgesh rulers established the production of local imitations of Chinese coins that were in circulation in the region until the reign of the Karakhanid dynasty (10th-12th centuries). The coins found at the Taraz excavations and dating back to the time of the Turgeshkhaganate differ from the types of coins that are usually represented in neighboring regions.

The coinage clearly reflects the political, economic and religious changes in the region. So, during the Karluk and Karakhanid dynasties, the production of coins was transferred to samples with arabic epigraphy, which minted the" world money " of that time - silver dirhams. In the 9th-11th centuries dirhams became the main monetary means of trade, they were minted and used in our region for almost 400 years. Archaeologists have collected a large collection of coins of the Karakhanid khans of the 11th-12th centuries at the Taraz settlement. many of these coins have the designation of the mint in the arabic script "Taraz".

The composition of the metal coins can be judged on the economic development of States. So, the so - called "black dirhams" were widely used, because for the economy of the metal, a large amount of copper was added to silver, which reduced the purchasing value of such coins. And sometimes they even added gold to silver dirhams. However, by the 11th century, the silver mines in the upper reaches of the Talas river quickly began to Deplete, which led to the" silver crisis", so the Karakhanids minted copper coins – Fels.

Separately, it is worth noting the collected collection of Chinese, Kokand and Russian coins of the 19th-early 20th century. These coins appear in the later layers of Taraz, when the city is revived after a long break under the name of Aulie-Ata and plays an important trade and economic role in the commodity-monetary relations of the region.