BUKHARA, bronze drachm, circa 650-725 AD

DescriptionBukhara is a city in Uzbekistan. It was a major station on the Silk Road. In the centuries before the coming of Islam it was run by the locals, who were ethnically Iranic Sogdians.Central Asia is the temperate zone just to the north of the Caucasus, Persia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In ancient times it was a zone with urban and agricultural regions periodically disrupted by invasions of nomads.In BC times the many of the nomads were Scythians. In the early AD period many of the nomads were Huns, then Turks.“Ancient Coins” includes Greek and Roman coins and those of neighbors and successors, geographically from Morocco and Spain all the way to Afghanistan. Date ranges for these begin with the world’s earliest coins of the 8th century BC to, in an extreme case, the end of Byzantine Empire, 1453 AD.