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Æ Half Unit - Alexander III
| Issuer | Kingdom of Macedonia |
|---|---|
| Year | 336 BC - 323 BC |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Diameter | Log in to see details |
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| Orientation | Variable alignment ↺ |
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| Obverse description | Young male head facing right, identified as Apollo or the youthful Alexander, rendered with wavy hair bound by a taenia or wreath, the locks falling in naturalistically modelled curls behind the neck. The portrait displays the idealized Hellenistic style characteristic of Macedonian royal coinage of the late 4th century BC. A dotted border frames the design at the coin's periphery. No legend appears on the obverse. The flan shows the typical irregularity of hand-struck ancient bronze coinage. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Log in to see details |
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| Reverse lettering | ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΥ (Translation: Alexander (III, the Great)) |
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| Additional information |
Alexander III issued bronze coinage primarily to pay for the day-to-day costs of the longest sustained military campaign the ancient world had seen — fodder, provisions, and soldier wages that gold and silver were too valuable to cover in small transactions. These bronzes circulated across an empire assembled in under a decade, from Macedonia to the Indus Valley, passing through economies that had never previously handled Macedonian coin.
Price 345 is among the more frequently encountered of Alexander's bronze types, though the attribution of individual pieces to specific mints remains genuinely difficult — Alexander operated as many as twenty mints simultaneously at the campaign's height.