Pantikapaion, the dominant Greek colony on the Cimmerian Bosporus, controlled the grain trade routes connecting the Black Sea steppe to Athens and the wider Aegean world. By the mid-third century BC the city was transitioning from its earlier electrum and gold issues — among the most artistically ambitious of any Greek colonial mint — toward a purely bronze civic coinage that served local market exchange rather than long-distance commerce.
The Anokhin sequence places this type well into the period of Spartocid dynastic rule, a half-Greek, half-Thracian lineage that governed Pantikapaion as nominal vassals of whatever Pontic power held regional dominance.
Pantikapaion, the dominant Greek colony on the Cimmerian Bosporus, controlled the grain trade routes connecting the Black Sea steppe to Athens and the wider Aegean world. By the mid-third century BC the city was transitioning from its earlier electrum and gold issues — among the most artistically ambitious of any Greek colonial mint — toward a purely bronze civic coinage that served local market exchange rather than long-distance commerce.
The Anokhin sequence places this type well into the period of Spartocid dynastic rule, a half-Greek, half-Thracian lineage that governed Pantikapaion as nominal vassals of whatever Pontic power held regional dominance.