Dirham - al-Mansur al-Muhammadiya

Al-Muhammadiya was a mint city founded by the Caliph al-Mansur and named in honor of the Prophet — a deliberate act of religious branding at a moment when the Abbasids were still consolidating legitimacy wrested from the Umayyads less than two decades earlier. The city sat near Rayy in the Iranian plateau, positioned to dominate eastern revenue flows into the new imperial capital at Baghdad, itself still under construction in 762.

Album 213.2 distinguishes this type within a closely related sequence of early Abbasid dirhams differentiated primarily by mint name and marginal Quranic inscription variants.