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Æ16
| Issuer | Sestos |
|---|---|
| Year | 300 BC |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Diameter | 16.0 mm |
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| Obverse description | Bare head of Hermes facing left, depicted in profile with fine archaic-style engraving. The god wears a broad-brimmed petasos helmet characteristic of his iconography, rendered with careful detail. The portrait is set within a beaded border encircling the flan, typical of Hellenistic civic bronze coinage of the Thracian Chersonese region. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Demeter enthroned and facing left, her draped figure rendered in the classical Greek tradition. She extends her right hand forward, presenting a bundle of grain ears symbolic of her dominion over the harvest, while an amphora is placed to the lower left of the composition. The abbreviated ethnic inscription appears in the field, identifying the issuing city. |
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| Additional information |
Sestos controlled the narrowest point of the Hellespont — roughly 1.2 kilometers across — and levied tolls on every vessel transiting between the Aegean and the Black Sea. That chokepoint made the city wealthy enough to mint its own bronze, and dependent enough on maritime traffic that its coinage history tracks almost directly with whoever held naval dominance in the region. SNG Copenhagen 928–929 represents a type struck during a period of relative Seleucid and then Lysimachean pressure on the Thracian Chersonese, before Sestos eventually fell under Ptolemaic influence in the mid-3rd century.