michanddave:
In Islamic nations, portraiture was prohibited under religious law, and therefore the coinage bore no portraits, just artistically arranged inscriptions. One of the most distinctive of these Islamic renditions is shown on the top picture of your Ottoman 'kurush' (?) piece.
The symbol on the top coin pic, a “tughra,” was used for centuries as the official mark of the sultan of the Ottoman Empire and appeared on coins, notes, stamps, and other documents. It was said to have originated with Sultan Murad I (1360–1389) who, unable to sign his name, dipped his hand in ink and pressed it onto the paper of a treaty. The three vertical strokes of the tughra supposedly represent the ring, index, and middle fingers; the extension to the right, the small finger; and the curved line to the left, the thumb. From sultan to sultan, the general design of the tughra remained the same, but each sultan's mark was distinctive, consisting of a complex monogram formed by the ruler's name, that of his father, the title khan, and the epithet, 'ever victorious.' The tughra was typically centered on the obverse of the coin with various symbols to the right and the regnal year of the sultan below.
I didn't answer your question, but hopefully, made the search more interesting.
Don..
(Source:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:...Zagon+tughra&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2&ie=UTF-)