The Artuqid dynasty of Hisn Kayfa and Amid was founded by Mu’in al-Din Sukman I (495-498 H/1101-1105 AD), the eldest son of the Amir Artuq who had been governor of Jerusalem under the Great Saljuqs.

After he was forced to give up Jerusalem by the Fatimids, he first settled in Amid, today the town of Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey, and was then given the fortress of Hisn Kayfa as a reward for lending his support to the Saljuqs in relieving the siege of Mosul.

He also received the city of Mardin as a result of internecine conflict among the Saljuqs, but after Sukman’s death in 502 (1108 -1109) Mardin went to his younger brother Il-Ghazi. The Sukmaniya branch of the Artuqid family ruled Hisn Kayfa for almost a hundred and thirty-five years before it was absorbed by the Ayyubid, al-Malik al-Kamil Muhammad, a nephew of Saladin, in 629 (1232).

Nur al-Din Muhammad was the fifth of the Artuqid rulers, and this is an exceptionally well struck example of the first coinage of his reign. The figure is probably a representation of the Archangel Gabriel (Jibra‘il) carrying a scroll, and, as it was struck in the first year of Nur al-Din’s reign, it is thought to have represented Gabriel bringing the message of the new ruler’s accession to his subjects. The scroll has always been an important attribute of Gabriel, as the herald of God. In a region where there was a heterogeneous population of Muslims, Christians and Jews Gabriel would have been a familiar figure to all of them.

The reverse legend takes Nur al-Din’s ancestry back through his father Qara Arslan, his grandfather Da’ud, to his greatgrandfather Sukman, and shows his loyalty to the Abbasid caliph al-Mustadi by naming himself “Defender of the Commander of the Faithful”. The calligraphy is a rounded and compact form of Kufic script to accommodate the long and complex legend on the reverse.