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1 Tanka - Sikandar Shah Baldat Firuzabad
| Issuer | Bengal Sultanate |
|---|---|
| Year | 1356-1389 |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
| Weight | 10.76 g |
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| Obverse description | Central field bears a multi-line Arabic legend within a ruled circle, reading: Abu'l Mujahid Sikandar Shah bin Ilyas Shah al-Sultan. The surrounding marginal legend, contained within a ruled border, carries the honorific inscription al-Imam al-A'zam wa'l Khalifat al-Mu'azzam, accompanied by the names of the Four Rightly-Guided Caliphs. The script is executed in a fine Naskh hand characteristic of Bengal Sultanate coinage of the mid-fourteenth century. |
|---|---|
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| Obverse lettering | أبو المجاهد سكندر شاه بن إلياس شاه السلطان / الإمام الأعظم والخليفة المعظم |
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| Additional information |
Sikandar Shah ruled Bengal for over three decades following the death of his father Iliyas Shah, founder of the Iliyas Shahi dynasty. His long reign brought relative administrative stability to a sultanate that had spent much of its early existence asserting independence from Delhi — a struggle his father had largely won by the 1350s. The mint epithet Baldat Firuzabad, meaning "the prosperous city," was a regnal title applied to the Bengal capital rather than a geographic renaming, a convention borrowed from earlier Delhi Sultanate coinage practice.
The Iliyas Shahi tanka series is well documented through the Goron-Goenka corpus, with DR#207 placing this squarely in the middle emission range of Sikandar's output.