Al-Walid I inherited the caliphate from his father Abd al-Malik, who had already fought and won the first Islamic coinage war — forcing out Byzantine monetary conventions and replacing them with purely epigraphic types. The Tabariya mint served the former Byzantine city of Tiberias, a major administrative node on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. The lion type sits outside the standard Umayyad epigraphic tradition and reflects the transitional turbulence of provincial minting in the years immediately following Abd al-Malik's reform, where local die-cutters still negotiated between old figural habits and the new caliphal orthodoxy.
Al-Walid I inherited the caliphate from his father Abd al-Malik, who had already fought and won the first Islamic coinage war — forcing out Byzantine monetary conventions and replacing them with purely epigraphic types. The Tabariya mint served the former Byzantine city of Tiberias, a major administrative node on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. The lion type sits outside the standard Umayyad epigraphic tradition and reflects the transitional turbulence of provincial minting in the years immediately following Abd al-Malik's reform, where local die-cutters still negotiated between old figural habits and the new caliphal orthodoxy.