Æ16

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.