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Tarsos, the principal city of Cilicia, operated as a semi-autonomous mint under Seleucid suzerainty through much of the second century BC. This issue falls within the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, whose aggressive Hellenization program — and catastrophic campaign against the Jerusalem Temple in 167 BC — destabilized the entire eastern Mediterranean and ultimately exhausted Seleucid resources in ways the dynasty never recovered from. Tarsos itself was sold by Antiochus IV to a certain Lysias to help finance those eastern campaigns, according to 2 Maccabees.