Falus Lion and Peacock

Herat operated as a semi-autonomous minting center through much of the Safavid and later Durrani and Barakzai periods, and its copper falus coinage circulated almost entirely at the local level — ignored by imperial monetary accounting yet essential to daily bazaar transactions. The lion and peacock pairing as a device type is unusual enough within the broader Afghan-Persian copper series that Zeno cataloguers have noted multiple die variants, suggesting sustained if irregular production across generations rather than a single mint episode.