Unknown Æ - Anonymous Ferghana, facing left, without cross, regular tamgha

The Ferghana valley, wedged between the Syr Darya tributaries and the Tian Shan foothills, sat at a crossroads continuously contested between the Tang dynasty, the Western Türk successor states, and the expanding Umayyad caliphate across the 7th and 8th centuries. Local coinage from this period operated largely outside all three powers — civic or dynastic issues whose tamgha marks functioned as issuing authority in the absence of any centralized mint apparatus. Smirnova 1372 belongs to a loose typological cluster distinguished precisely by the absence of the cross-bearing variant, suggesting a specific issuing group or sub-period within the broader anonymous series.