The Riddle of Ibn al-Zubayr’s Earliest Coinage, 681-683 CE

Abstract

Coins bearing the name of ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zubayr and dating to the reign of the Umayyad caliph Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiya (r. 60-64 AH/680-684 CE) have been known for a long time, but scholars have either dismissed them as anachronistic dates resulting from the use of old reverse dies or have readily accepted them as genuine issues from these years, without providing a historical context for their production or studying the corpus in toto. The present study offers a critical assessment of this coinage by taking the literary evidence and historical context into account. Establishing the sequence of coins issued by each mint against the political background of the early stages of the Second Muslim Civil War (60-73 AH/680-692 CE), it demonstrates that these coins do indeed date to the years their date legends exhibit, thereby offering a fresh appraisal of the political history of southern Iran in this period and of the early course of the civil war, whose start it argues ought to be placed at the accession of Yazīd in 60 AH/680 CE rather than his death four years later.