Four coins. Seven centuries. Three civilisations. One unbroken thread of silver.
When the Arab armies swept out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 630s and 640s, they did not destroy the monetary systems they found. They absorbed them. The Byzantine gold solidus and the Sasanian drachm kept circulating in the conquered territories for decades after the conquest, because the new rulers had no immediate replacement. When they finally did build one, they built it on the same weight standards, the same silver content, and the same basic architecture of coin that Rome and Persia had established. What changed was the imagery, and it changed in a way that no empire in the ancient world had ever tried before.
This collection holds four coins that together span that entire story, from the high-water mark of the first Islamic empire to the small silver coinage of a forgotten Anatolian dynasty perched on the edge of the Ottoman era. Placed side by side, they show you something that almost no popular history of coins bothers to trace: the continuous, unbroken evolution of imperial monetary convention from the Roman world through to the late medieval Islamic one.
The Monetary Revolution That Started With a Name
To understand what the Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik Umayyad Dirham in this collection represents, you first need to understand what his father did.
Hisham’s father, Abd al-Malik, was one of the most consequential caliphs in Islamic history. Among his many reforms, one stands out for numismatists: in approximately AD 696 to 699, he abolished all imagery from Islamic coinage entirely. Before his reform, the Umayyad state had been striking coins that still looked unmistakably like what they were copying. Gold coins imitated the Byzantine solidus, complete with a standing emperor figure and a cross on steps. Silver coins imitated the Sasanian drachm, complete with a crowned portrait and a fire altar. Abd al-Malik stripped all of that away and replaced it with text alone: Quranic verses, the shahada, the name of the mint, and the date in the Islamic hijri calendar. No portraits, no symbols, no inherited imagery from Rome or Persia. Just the Word.
It was the most radical redesign of a monetary system since Augustus reorganised Roman coinage in 23 BC, and unlike Augustus’s reform (which preserved the basic architecture of Republican coinage while replacing its political meaning), Abd al-Malik’s reform severed the Islamic dirham from every visual tradition that had come before it. What mattered now was not what the coin looked like, but what it said.
The Hisham dirham in this collection, struck during his reign from AH 105 to 125 (AD 724 to 743), is that reform in its fully matured form. Hisham was the tenth Umayyad caliph and the last to preside over the caliphate at genuine imperial scale before the Abbasid revolution of 750 dismantled everything his dynasty had built. His nineteen-year reign was the longest of the Umayyad era, and his dirham is visually unlike anything else in the collection: two concentric rings of Arabic text on each side, no portrait, no reverse figure, no mint mark in the exergue as Roman coins used (see our guide to mint marks for comparison), no eagle, no fire altar. The coin communicates entirely in language. Where every previous monetary tradition in the Mediterranean and Near East had used images to convey imperial authority, the Umayyad dirham used theology.
The Coin That Refused to Change: Farrukhan and Tabaristan
What makes the Farrukhan Silver Hemidrachm (Year 76 PYE) so extraordinary is precisely its date. Year 76 of the Post-Yazdegerd Era translates to approximately AD 727 to 728, which means this coin was in circulation at the same time as the Hisham dirham above, possibly within the same year. Two coins, the same moment in history, the same general region of the world, and they look as though they belong to different centuries.
Where the Hisham dirham carries nothing but Arabic script, the Farrukhan hemidrachm carries a Sasanian-style portrait of the ruler in a mural crown on the obverse, Pahlavi script in the margins, and on the reverse, a Zoroastrian fire altar flanked by two attendants. It is, visually, almost indistinguishable from a coin of Khusro II struck a century earlier. That is entirely deliberate.
Farrukhan the Great was the Ispahbad (military governor) of Tabaristan, a region tucked into the forested mountains south of the Caspian Sea in what is now northern Iran. The Dabuyid dynasty he led had survived the Islamic conquest of Persia by exploiting terrain that the Arab armies found nearly impossible to campaign in. In 716, Farrukhan defeated a major Umayyad invasion under the general Yazid ibn al-Muhallab, one of the Caliphate’s most experienced commanders. His victory allowed Tabaristan to maintain its autonomy, pay nominal tribute to the Umayyads, and continue striking coins in the old Sasanian style as if the conquest of Persia had barely touched them.
The Post-Yazdegerd Era dating on these coins is itself a statement. The year is counted from the assassination of Yazdegerd III, the last Sasanian king, in 651 AD. Counting from his death was not just a calendrical convention: it was a declaration that Persian political and cultural legitimacy had not ended with the Arab conquest, only interrupted. The Dabuyid coins are, in the most literal sense, a refusal to accept that the old world was over.
The Farrukhan hemidrachm and the Hisham dirham are the two poles of the eighth century’s monetary identity crisis: one dynasty that scrubbed all tradition from its coins, and one dynasty that clung to its tradition with both hands and minted it in silver every year.
Five Centuries Later: The Lion and the Sun
By the time the Seljuq Turks arrived in Anatolia in the eleventh century, the Islamic world had absorbed and transformed the Persian tradition so thoroughly that it was no longer recognisable as a survivor of anything. What the Seljuqs brought was something different again: a Turkic-Persian court culture that took the inherited conventions of Islamic coinage and, in one extraordinary moment, broke them.
The Kaykhusraw II dirham in this collection is that moment. Struck at Sivas and Konya between AH 638 and 641 (approximately AD 1240 to 1243), the Lion and Sun dirham is one of the most visually distinctive Islamic coins ever produced. On the obverse, a lion strides rightward under a radiant sun with a human face. In a monetary tradition that had spent five centuries insisting on pure text and no imagery, this is a dramatic departure, and its explanation tells you everything about the cultural complexity of medieval Anatolia.
The lion almost certainly represents Kaykhusraw himself. The sun is believed to represent his Georgian wife, Gurju Khatun (also called Tamar), a Christian princess whose astrological sign was Leo, or alternatively whose radiance the sultan wished to commemorate in silver. Whether it is astrology, love poetry, or political messaging compressed into a coin die, the effect is unmistakable: a sultan of the Seljuqs of Rum (the Anatolian branch of the Seljuq dynasty) was minting coins with figural imagery in an Islamic state, and nobody stopped him.
Kaykhusraw II is remembered, as the ruler page notes, as the last Seljuq sultan to exercise real power. In 1243, less than three years after the most beautiful of these Lion and Sun dirhams were struck, the Mongol army under Baiju shattered his forces at the Battle of Kose Dag and reduced the Sultanate of Rum to a vassal state. The coins bearing the most confident, artistically ambitious imagery in the entire Seljuq coinage series were struck in the last years before everything collapsed. There is something almost elegiac about that timing.
The Edge of the Ottoman World: The Eretnid Akce
The Ali Beg Silver Akce (Eretnid Beylik, AD 1366 to 1380) is the smallest coin in this group in physical terms, and the one that points most directly toward what came next. After the Mongol dissolution of the Seljuq state, Anatolia fractured into a patchwork of small Turkish principalities called beyliks. The Eretnids were one of these, founded by Eretna, a Mongol-era Ilkhanate governor who declared independence as the Ilkhanate collapsed in the 1340s. Ali Beg was his grandson and the last of the dynasty, ruling from 1366 until his death in 1380.
The akce Ali Beg struck is pure text coinage in the tradition of Abd al-Malik’s reform, six and a half centuries earlier: Arabic script on both faces, no imagery, the ruler’s name and titles, the mint, and the date. But its denomination and weight standard are critical. The akce was the small silver unit that the Ottoman Empire would soon standardise as its primary coinage. The Ottomans, who absorbed the Eretnid territories in the 1390s, did not invent their monetary system from nothing. They inherited it, as the Umayyads had inherited the Sasanian and Byzantine systems before them, and as every empire in this story had inherited from whatever came before.
The Unbroken Thread
Set all four coins in a line and the inheritance becomes visible, even if it is not always obvious. The Hisham dirham weighs approximately 2.97 grams of silver: the standardised weight Abd al-Malik had fixed in his reform, which itself was calibrated to the weight of the Sasanian drachm, which was in turn calibrated to allow exchange with the Roman denarius. The Kaykhusraw dirham is heavier, reflecting later Seljuq standards, but still operating within the same basic monetary logic: a round silver coin of known purity and declared weight, circulating on trust in the authority of the name stamped on it.
What changes across these four coins is not the structure of money. It is the identity of the issuer, the language on the surface, and the imagery (or absence of imagery) chosen to represent authority. Each of those changes was itself a political act. Abd al-Malik’s removal of imagery was a declaration that Islamic authority required no visual legitimacy borrowed from Rome or Persia. Farrukhan’s maintenance of Sasanian iconography was a declaration that the old Persian world had not died. Kaykhusraw’s lion and sun was a declaration that his personal story was worth commemorating in silver. Ali Beg’s austere akce was a declaration of continuity with the monetary conventions his successors, the Ottomans, would carry forward for another four centuries.
The arc that runs from the Roman denarius through the Sasanian drachm to the Umayyad dirham to the Seljuq dirham to the Eretnid akce is not a story of rupture. It is a story of absorption, adaptation, and survival. Empires fall. Monetary conventions endure. And the coin in your hand, whatever its script and whatever its century, is always carrying the memory of every coin that came before it.
For the broader context of how the Andronikos II Byzantine basilikon fits into this same story from the Christian imperial side, that piece is the natural companion to this one, since both the Byzantine and Islamic monetary traditions were navigating the same Mediterranean economic world and frequently responding to each other.
