Drachm - Kidara Sassanian style, type 11, Gandhara mint

The Kidarites emerged as the Kushano-Sassanian administrative structure collapsed under pressure from their own westward migration, and their coinage reflects exactly that transitional moment — a conquered Sassanian visual vocabulary repurposed by a new ruling dynasty that needed legitimacy faster than it could build it. Göbl's type 11 specifically belongs to the Gandhara mint sequence, a region the Kidarites controlled before the Hephthalite incursions of the late 4th and early 5th centuries displaced them further west. The mint attribution itself remains contested in specialist literature, with some scholars arguing the fabric points to multiple workshop sources rather than a single Gandharan center.