Umayyad Caliphate, Silver coinage. AR Dirham (26.5mm, 2.76 g, 4h). Ard mint. Dated AH 82 (AD 701/2). Klat 30 (same obverse die as illustration); al-‘Ajlan 82/3 (same obverse die as illustration). Small attempted piercing at 1h on obverse, light graffiti above reverse field. VF. Extremely rare, only two specimens recorded by Klat..
Michael Bates proposed that Ard was ‘nothing more than a die-engraver's error for Ardashir Khurra’ (Bates, Mystery Mints of the Umayyads, ONS Occasional Paper 22, 1987), but this seems highly unlikely on two counts. Firstly, another dirham from ‘Ard’ dated AH 79 has come to light since Bates wrote, and it is hard to imagine that the same error would have been repeated on coins struck three years apart. Secondly, die-engravers’ errors on Umayyad dirhams are highly unusual and generally minor, such as ‘Dashtaq’ for ‘Dimashq’, or ‘bi-Harat’ written retrograde as ‘Ahbahr’. Bates’s suggestion required the engraver to have omitted almost all of the intended mint-name: an extreme error, and one without parallel.
Rather than being an error, it seems more likely that ‘Ard’ may have been engraved deliberately as an abbreviation for Ardashir Khurra, copying the Pahlawi mint-signature ART used on Arab-Sasanian drachms. Klat records dirhams with the full mint-name Ardashir Khurra dated AH 80, 83 and 84, but there are good grounds for reading the date on the coins purportedly dated ‘80’ as ‘84’ (see CNG Islamic Auction 3, lot 55). This would give a sequence where post-Reform dirhams struck at Ardashir Khurra used ‘Ard’ in AH 79 and 82, before adopting the full mint-name from AH 83 onwards. If so, ‘Ard’ would be an excessively rare case of a Pahlawi mint-signature being reused as an Arabic mint-name.
