Æ16

Arados — the island city-state off the Syrian coast, modern Arwad — maintained remarkable autonomy through successive Ptolemaic and Seleucid overlordships, and its bronze coinage reflects that stubborn civic independence. The city ran its own era dating system beginning in 259 BC, one of the few Phoenician cities to do so, which allows these bronzes to be dated with unusual precision relative to most Hellenistic civic issues. The Duyrat corpus, the definitive modern study of Aradian coinage, distinguishes several die groups within this range based on control marks — minor symbols that accumulate into a surprisingly granular chronology.