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But something quite unexpected happened to those coins with Abd al-Malik standing on them. After a few years, they simply vanished. During the Hijra year 77 (697 AD), the Standing Caliph coin was suddenly replaced with a design that could hardly be more different. There's no caliph, there's no figure, only words. This is the defining moment for Islamic public art. From now on no human image would be used in such a public arena for well over a thousand years.
但令人意想不到的是，短短幾年，這些帶有馬利克像的貨幣竟消失了。希吉拉77年（公元697年>，鑄有哈里發站姿的貨幣被一種截然不同的貨幣取代。新的貨幣上沒有哈里發，也沒有任何圖像，只有文字。這是伊斯蘭公共藝術的 一個決定性時刻。此后長達千年的時間內，都不再有人像在公共場所出現。
Back in the Coins and Medals department, I'm examining the reformed coin in more detail.It's exactly the same size and weight as the earlier coin, it's also made of solid gold, but it says that it was made in the year 77, so one year later than the previous coin. And now there's nothing to see but text. On the front it reads: "There is no god except God alone, he has no partner; Muhammad is the Messenger of God whom he sent with guidance and the religion of truth that he may make it victorious over every other religion." This is an adaptation of a text from the Qu'ran.
至于硬幣部分,我更詳細地端詳這枚歷經改革過后的硬幣。第二枚金幣的尺寸與重量都與第一枚完全相同，也用純金制成。它的制作時間只比上一枚晚一年,但上面鎊刻的內容只剩下文字。正面是：“萬物非主，唯有真主。穆罕默德是真主的使者，真主以正道和真教的使 命委托他的使者，以便他使真教勝過一切宗教。”這段話出自《古蘭經》。
And on the back of the coin is another Qu'ranic text: "God is One, God is the Eternal. He begets not, neither is he begotten."
硬幣的背面還有另一段《古蘭經》文字：“他是真主，是獨一的主，真主是萬物所仰賴的，他沒有生產，也沒有被生產。”
The inscriptions on this coin make, I think, two extraordinarily interesting points. Firstly, this is almost the oldest Qu'ranic text to have survived. Before Muhammad, Arabic was barely a written language at all, but now there was of course a vital need to record God's words accurately, and so the first developed Arabic script-the "kufic" script-was created.
金幣上的文字引發兩點有趣的思考。首先，這是現存最古老的《古蘭經》經文。在穆罕默德之前，阿拉伯世界幾乎沒有任何文字，但精確抄錄神的話語的需求促成了最早的阿拉伯文字—庫法文誕生。
