Dirham - Anonymous Herat

The anonymous Herat dirhams fall within the period of Abd al-Malik's sweeping monetary reform, which abolished the old Sasanian-derived imagery and replaced it with purely epigraphic designs — a politically charged decision that standardized coinage across a caliphate stretching from Iberia to Central Asia. Herat, sitting at a key node of Khorasan trade routes, was one of several eastern mints brought into this new framework, though attribution of specific pieces to the mint remains dependent on mint name placement and script variants rather than any centralized die control.

The weight here sits noticeably below the reformed standard of roughly 2.97 g, which was itself derived from the theoretical Islamic mithqal.