This one I received from another forum's Secret Santa. Someone took note of my recent interest in early Islamic and sent me this very nice Abbasid bronze struck in the name of the Caliph al-Mahdi.
al-Mahdi, Abbasid Caliphate
AE Fals
Obv: Kufic legend (in center): "[There is] no deity except / God alone / no [one is] equal to him", two pellets below, all within triple linear circle, five annulets in margins
Rev: Kufic legend (in center): "Muhammad / is the Messenger of / God"; Kufic legend (in margins): "Ordered by al-Mahdi Muhammad commander of the faithful, of al-Kufa [in the] year seven and sixty and [one] hundred (year 167)
Mint: Kufa (struck 783-784 AD)
Ref: Album 306
The Abbasid Caliphate (al-Khilāfah al-‘Abbāsīyyah) was the third of the great Islamic empires that succeeded the Prophet Muhammad. The Abbasids were a group of Arabs that claimed descent from one of Muhammad's uncles, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, and believed themselves to be closer to the Prophet than the then-ruling Umayyad dynasty, whom the Abbasids saw as illegitimate rulers. They used their familial claim and the people's discontent with the Umayyads to give legitimacy to their revolution that they launched in 746 AD. Four years later the Abbasids finally achieved their goal of toppling the Umayyads and establishing their own caliphate. One way they distinguished themselves from the Umayyads was to move away from the traditional Umayyad capital at Damascus, and created their own capital in 762, the great round city of Madinat al-Salam in Iraq (which would later be known as Baghdad). During al-Mahdi's reign (775-785), Madinat al-Salam became the most populous city in the world at that time.
More on the Abbasids:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked...asid-DynastyA relatively short read of al-Mahdi and his reign:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-MahdiThe Abbasid Caliphate around the mid 8th-9th centuries:
(map source:zonu.com)
Posted 12/28/2014 8:48 pm
