Unknown Æ - Anonymous Ferghana, facing left, with cross, regular tamgha

The Ferghana valley, wedged between the Syr Darya and the Tian Shan range, sat at one of the most contested chokepoints on the Silk Road during the seventh and eighth centuries — fought over successively by the Western Türk Khaganate, Tang China, and the expanding Umayyad caliphate. These anonymous bronzes were produced under local rulers who navigated that pressure by adapting coinage traditions from multiple directions simultaneously, which explains the hybrid iconographic vocabulary that makes attribution so difficult. The cross motif on this type has generated genuine scholarly disagreement about Nestorian Christian influence versus purely decorative borrowing.

Smirnova's catalog remains the foundational reference, though her numbering was assembled before several Ferghana hoards surfaced in the 1990s that complicated the sequence.