The tourist markets of Oman are full of jewelry, daggers, and accoutrements left over from the days when the country was home to a thriving silversmithing industry. Now, domestic demand is gone and orphaned silver trinkets are hawked to foreigners, including silver discs about the size of an adult’s hand with texts etched into them. These inscribed medallions are known as kirsh kitab, or coin writing, and they were made in the Omani towns of Nizwa, Bahla, and Rustaq until the end of the twentieth century. Crafted to be worn around a woman’s neck, these pieces were thought to protect their owners by bearing words from the Qur’an. Texts make a kirsh kitab what it is; without texts, it is either an unfinished silver blank or a sumpt necklace on a chain, neither of which can safeguard anyone. This reliance on words to transform metal into something capable of shielding its wearers from otherworldly threats makes the texts themselves a focal point. Yet, what emerges when the kirsh kitab are scrutinized as texts for content is not uniformity, even when the same ayah - Ayah al Kursi - is purportedly being repeatedly copied across samples, but considerable diversity; missing words and ayat that are jumbled or incomplete are commonplace. The purpose of this paper is to examine why textual accuracy was not a requisite for effectiveness despite the fact that the kirsh kitab relied on divine texts. Particularly, this study analyzes the links between knowledge and its reproduction and demonstrates that when the latter is manifest in the texts of the kirsh kitab, imprecision is acceptable as long as the former is considered intact. For the men who made the kirsh kitab, part of this lies in the understanding that memorization of scripture, public displays of piety and intention could all compensate for any textual mistakes that they made in their writings. The first section of this presentation will situate the kirsh kitab in Oman’s silversmithing heritage and provide an overview of their protective capacities. Next, a quantitative summary of the texts of over one hundred kirsh kitab will be given to illustrate the nature of the inaccuracies found in them. Finally, explanations given by the retired makers of the kirsh kitab will shed light on how their faculty to create texts was not embedded in typical notions of textual authority but instead nested in formulations of virtue.