Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

Introduction of New Arabic Coinage
Another important development, again focusing on Abdul Malik and al-Hajjaj, is the introduction, for the first time, of a specifically Muslim coinage. As with the languages of administration, so with the coinage; the Arab conquerors had taken over and only slightly adapted the Bvzantine and Sasanid coins which v\ere in circulation, and the mints which had produced these
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coins continued to do so for the Arabs. The minting of gold coins was a Byzantine imperial prerogative, and the Arabs continued to import gold coins from Byzantium. In this way the pre-conquest gold denarius, silver drachma and copper follis became the Arab dinar, dirham and fils. Some experiments with a new type of coinage made by the Sufyanid rulers proved unsuccessful, and it was not until the

690s, both in Syria and in Iraq, that Abdul Malik and al-Hajjaj began to mint coins of a decisively new type, allegedly in response to a threat by the Byzantine ruler to stamp the gold coins exported to the Arabs with anti-Muslim formulae.

The most important characteristic of the new coinage was the fact that it was purely epigraphic. The faces of the coins were inscribed only with Muslim religious formulae, not with the portraits of rulers or other pictorial representations which had marked the Byzantine and Sasanid as well as some of the earlier Arab coins. This was a decisive break with numismatic tradition, and provided the model which Muslim coins have generally, but not always, followed since.