Drachm - Hephthalite Prince

The Hephthalites — the "White Huns" of Byzantine and Sasanian sources — effectively shattered Sasanian power in 484 when Peroz I rode into a trap near the Oxus and died along with much of his army. The coinage that followed borrowed heavily from Sasanian prototypes, a deliberate appropriation of imperial legitimacy from the dynasty they had just humiliated into paying tribute for decades.

Göbl's classification of this type places it within a sequence now understood as regional imitations produced by subordinate Hephthalite princes rather than a central mint — accounting for the fabric variations that complicate attribution across the series.