Every traveler has their bucket list and every collector their objects of desire. I'm not a serious enough collector - nor rich enough - to go looking for true unicorns in the world of ancient coins, but there are a few targets I have long had in mind. Some I have already succeeded in acquiring. Others have slipped through my hands many times - like this weird coin issued by Al-Hajjaj bin Yousuf, the Umayyad governor or Iraq and Fars sometime in the late 7th or early 8th century CE.
It is a very curious fact about the early history of Islam that the basic creed of Islam - the shahadah, "la ilaha illah allah wahdahu /muhammad rasul allah" (There is no God but Allah alone, and Muhammad is Allah's messenger) - does not appear in the textual, architectural, or archaeological record outside of the Qur'an until several decades after the death of the Prophet. Of course, this creed pervades all of the Qur'an, and we now have virtually the entire body of the Qur'an dated back to the mid-7th century when it is believed to have been formalized by the 3rd Islamic Caliph, 'Uthman ibn 'Affan, but we don't find the creed written or engraved anywhere, or even stated as such in the Qur'an. The first known instance of the second part, "muhammad rasul allah" (Muhammad is Allah's messenger) is on a coin issued by 'Abd al-Malik ibn 'Abd Allah, the Zubayrid governor of Fars during the Second Fitnah (civil war) of Islam. This coin was issued in 66 AH (685-686 CE) in Bishapur, the administrative capital of Fars province. This is also believed to be the earliest known example of the use of the Prophet Muhammad's name outside of the Qur'an, where it is mentioned four times. This practice was also followed by Khalid ibn 'Ab Allah, who succeeded his brother as governor around 70 AH. I have written about it before (see the two photographs below). It is believed that the use of this declaration about the Prophet was an attempt by the partisans of Ibn Zubayr to claim the mantle of the Prophet in their fight against the Umayyads.
After the defeat of Ibn Zubayr and the re-establishment of Umayyad rule in 692 CE (73 AH), the Caliph 'Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan issued the first known coin with the complete creed. This was a gold coin, where the inscription of the creed surrounded three standing figures imitated from Byzantine coins, usually seen as representing the Emperor Heraclius and his two sons. A few copies of this exceptionally rare and important coin are in museums, including the Ashmolean in Oxford, and in the Khalili Collection. This is the coin that sold for $160,000 - probably to a museum - in the most recent CNG auction ISlamic Auction no. 13). It was Lot 3 in the auction. The Hajjaj coin was Lot 4 - the next item.
Al-Hajjaj ibn Yousuf al-Thaqafi was a powerful - and much reviled - figure in early Islamic history. It was his ruthless tactics, including the bombardment of Makkah and Madinah and the destruction of the Ka'ba, that that had defeated Ibn Zubayr. He was appointed governor of Hejaz in 692, and then governor of Iraq (including Fars) is 694, where he ruled with an iron fist until his death in 714 CE. It was his nephew, Muhammad ibn Qasim who led the Arab conquest of Sindh in 711-712 CE.
Sometime during his rule in Iraq - probably fairly early - Hajjaj issued coinage with the full shahadah inscribed around the picture of the Sassanian emperor (the standard location for Islamic inscriptions on such coins.) On some coins, the shahadah was written in a normal orientation, as shown in the photograph below. But on other coins, the engraver used a very strange way of writing the text, having it oriented orthogonal to the edge of the coin, and breaking the text into small chunks, even splitting single words. This is the coin ofthe moment. I first saw it about 18 years ago in a catalog from my main coin dealer, Stephen Album, but it sold almost immediately for a price that seemed quite high to me. Since then, I have encountered it in auctions perhaps three or four times, but each time the bids went higher than the most I was prepared to spend. Not this time, though. And the nice thing is that the price I ended up paying was virtually the same as that which I had failed to pay 18 years ago. What with inflation and all, that amount no longer seems exorbitant at all.
Perhaps one thing that kept the price down this time was that this coin is clipped down from its original size. That is because, when 'Abd al-Malik reformed his coinage around 695 CE, the new silver coins with only text and no images weighed slightly less than the old standard of the Sassanian-style coins used until then (with pictures of the Shahanshah and a fire altar with attendants). The old coins were then clipped down to the new weight and continued to be used. The fact that this coin is clipped indicates that it remained in use after the reforms, which makes it even more interesting. Fortunately, the clipping did not damage the inscription. It's interesting that, like the Zubayrid coins mentioned above, this coin and its more well-oriented cousin were also minted in Bishapur - a storied Sassanian city famous for its repeated rebellions against the Umayyads, and reduced to ruins in the 11th century. Perhaps it was simply a continuation of the innovation started by Abd al-Malik ibn 'Abd Allah to make coins the carriers of the creed. We know that these coins were only minted briefly, and there is some indication that the populace did not like the mixing of sacred text with non-Islamic iconography. Soon, sacred texts - including entire lines from the Qur'an - would become standard on all coinage and the pictures would disappear from Islamic coins for several centuries (see example below).
One final note. In Sassanian coins the sideways text in front of the emperor's face usually names the ruler or governor in the Pahlavi script. This, for example, is how Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufiyan, the first Umayyad Caliph, named himself on some coins, adding "Commander of the Faithful" for good measure - but all in Pahlavi, as shown in the photograph below.
Another coin used the space for a Pahlavi translation of "Muhammad, messenger of God". But Hajjaj put his name on all his coins in Arabic - al-Hajjaj bin Yousuf. It can be read easily by anyone familiar with the Arabic script, though it's written in the Kufic style. I think this was definitely a flex - an invitation for everyone to read his name and know who was boss: Gaze on my name, ye mighty, and despair! Perhaps he even identified a bit with the emperor Khusro II Parviz, whose portrait the coin bears and whose abandoned capital of Ctesiphon lay not far from Hajjaj's base in Wasit.
