Æ21 - Marcus Aurelius ΚΥΖΙΚΗΝΩΝ (Ζ shaped as エ)

Cyzicus was one of the most commercially active mints in the eastern empire, and its civic bronze issues under Marcus Aurelius reflect a city still leveraging centuries of financial prestige — it had operated one of the ancient world's most respected electrum stater series before Roman absorption. The variant spelling of ΚΥΖΙΚΗΝΩΝ rendered with a Ζ formed in the shape of the Japanese katakana エ is a genuine epigraphic curiosity, likely a letter-cutter's regional habit rather than an error, and has been noted across a small cluster of dies from this period.