Dirham - Anonymous Hulwan

Hulwan, situated at the foot of the Zagros Mountains on the main road from Baghdad to Khorasan, was among the earliest mints to strike fully reformed Islamic dirhams following the monetary overhaul initiated by Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan in 696–698 AD. That reform abolished figural imagery entirely and replaced Sasanian-derived coin types with purely epigraphic designs — a rupture with centuries of Persian minting tradition driven as much by theological conviction as administrative consolidation. The anonymous attribution reflects the absence of a caliph's name on the issue, a feature of certain provincial outputs before naming conventions fully standardized across the caliphate.

At 2.80 g, this piece falls slightly below the reformed dirham's canonical target weight of approximately 2.97 g — not unusual for Hulwan, where weight consistency was less rigorously enforced than at the major Syrian mints.