Æ19 Tyche, Sandan

Tarsus enjoyed a long run of civic autonomy under Seleucid and later Roman suzerainty, and its bronze coinage of this period reflects that semi-independent status — the city retained the right to strike its own bronzes even as larger political authority shifted hands. Sandan was a specifically Cilician deity, a god of storm and vegetation whose cult predated Greek settlement in the region and persisted stubbornly alongside the Hellenized Tyche well into the Roman period.

The pairing of these two figures on a single type is an unusually explicit acknowledgment of the indigenous religious substrate beneath Tarsus's Greek civic veneer.