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Message:: [QUOTE="GinoLR, post: 8198270, member: 128351"]I find these Ailiya fulus fascinating. First, the name of the city: ايليا فلستين , Ailiya Filastin... This is the Latin name Aelia Palaestinae, or Greek Αἰλία Παλαιστίνης. Where did they unearth this old Roman official name, at a time when the Byzantine Empire called the city Hierosolyma? We can read Hierosolyma in Greek on dated inscriptions from the Middle East. Heraclius re-opened the city mint and there were folles with mint-mark IЄPOCOL like this one (#notmycoin): [ATTACH=full]1436273[/ATTACH] They also called the city "Hagia polis", as we can read on the 6th c. Madaba Mosaic Map : Η ΑΓΙΑ ΠΟΛΙC ΙЄΡΟΥCΑ[ΛEM], "the Holy City Jerusalem". In the 7th c. it seems that, at first, this city was not that much "holy" for the Muslims, they just called her by her Roman official pagan name. It is true that the name of Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Quran. But a religious evolution soon occurred, and the Umayyad caliphs built there the Dome of the Rock and the mosque nearby that was soon to be known as al-Aqsa. And the Muslims ceased to use the "Ailiya Filastin" name, they used "Hagia polis" instead, in Arabic "al-Quds". Now, the obverse. It is interpreted as a figure of the standing caliph (which one, we don't know). But the legend surrounding him is "Muhammad rasulillah": "Muhammad God's Prophet". Anybody who had such a coin in hand would naively suppose that, on a coin obverse, there is a direct link between the image of a person and the legend surrounding it, and that the standing man is Muhammed. Was it the case? Did the earliest Muslims think that Muhammed's image was not more a taboo than Jesus' image for the Melkite Christians? These "Ailiya Filastin" fulus are an extraordinary document on the first Islam, when islamic sunni orthodoxy was not fixed yet.[/QUOTE]

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