1 Cash - Shishpir Samarqand

Samarkand in the first half of the seventh century was a Sogdian city-state under the rule of the Ikhshids, caught between Göktürk suzerainty to the north and the accelerating Arab conquests pressing from the west. The ruler name "Shishpir" is a Sogdian rendering of the Iranian name Shapur, reflecting the deep cultural entanglement between Sogdiana and Sasanian Persia even as the Sasanian Empire itself was collapsing under Arab pressure during precisely these years.

Smirnova's corpus remains the foundational reference for pre-Islamic Sogdian coinage, and number 48 places this squarely among the earlier Samarkand civic issues before the Arab conquest fundamentally disrupted local minting traditions around 712.