The article reviews the involvement of dirhams from the Near East - dirhams and West-European denarii in Eastern European monetary circulation from the 8th to the 12th century, discusses the characteristics of simple monetary circulation, the timeframe for the arrival of silver coins on the continent and the main routes they followed to do so, the characteristics of several categories of coins finds from archaeological sites, and also prospects offered by the use of numismatic chronology for the dating of medieval sites.