Qanhari Dirham 'Damma' - 'Abd al-Rahman

The Qanhari dirhams of Sind represent the fragmented monetary output of a region that had slipped almost entirely outside Abbasid administrative reach by the mid-ninth century. Local Hindu-Buddhist governors and Arab holdovers struck their own reduced coinage with little coordination — which explains the dramatic weight reduction visible in this series relative to standard Islamic dirham norms. At 0.52g, this piece is barely a fifth of what a full dirham should weigh.

The name 'Abd al-Rahman places this within a lineage of Arab amirs clinging to Mansura and its surrounds long after Baghdad had effectively abandoned the Indus frontier.