Drachm - 'Gorigo Shah' Arab-Hephthalite

The Arab-Hephthalite series occupies one of the more complicated corners of early Islamic numismatics — coins struck by Umayyad governors and local rulers in the eastern territories who found it politically expedient to imitate Sasanian prototypes rather than impose distinctly Islamic types on newly conquered populations. The 'Gorigo Shah' issues reflect exactly that accommodation: a hybrid monetary pragmatism in the decades immediately following the Arab conquest of Transoxiana and the Kabul region, where pre-Islamic iconographic authority still carried weight with local populations.

Album 104 places this squarely within the early Umayyad administrative coinage of the east, circa the reign of Abd al-Malik — the same caliph who would soon impose reformed purely Islamic coinage across the empire after 696.