The Cimmerians — a nomadic people expelled from the Pontic steppe by Scythian pressure around 700 BC — swept through Anatolia with enough force to sack Gordion and threaten the major Greek coastal cities. Whether they struck coinage themselves or whether these small electrum fractions were produced by Lydian or Ionian mints and merely attributed to them by later cataloguers remains genuinely contested. The BMC attribution has never achieved full scholarly consensus.
The Cimmerians — a nomadic people expelled from the Pontic steppe by Scythian pressure around 700 BC — swept through Anatolia with enough force to sack Gordion and threaten the major Greek coastal cities. Whether they struck coinage themselves or whether these small electrum fractions were produced by Lydian or Ionian mints and merely attributed to them by later cataloguers remains genuinely contested. The BMC attribution has never achieved full scholarly consensus.