Æ28

Carthage struck no coinage of its own until the late fifth century BC, when the need to pay Greek mercenaries during the Sicilian campaigns forced the city to produce coins on foreign soil — initially in Sicily itself, using Greek dies and Greek standards. The shift to a domestic bronze coinage came later and gradually, as Carthage's commercial reach demanded a fiduciary currency for local exchange rather than the high-value silver it had always preferred for external trade.

The MAA 18 reference places this piece within Jenkins and Lewis's foundational 1963 corpus, still the primary typological framework for early Carthaginian bronze.