Dirham - Fakhr al-Din Qara Arslan figure with globe and scepter

Fakhr al-Din Qara Arslan ruled Hisn Kayfa from roughly 1144 to 1167, navigating the fractious politics of the Jazira during the Zengid ascendancy — a period when small Artuqid lords maintained autonomy largely through careful neutrality and strategic marriage alliances. The Artuqids were unusual among their contemporaries in producing figural copper coinage at a time when much of the Islamic world was moving away from representational imagery, a practice that almost certainly reflects the persistence of Byzantine and Syriac Christian visual culture in the upper Tigris region.

The globe-and-scepter type belongs to a broader Artuqid tradition of borrowing Hellenistic and late Roman imperial iconographic conventions, filtered through local workshop habits rather than any direct numismatic copying.