Æ27 - Antoninus Pius ΚΥΖΙΚΗΝΩΝ ΝΕΟΚΟΡΩΝ (Ζ shaped as エ)

Cyzicus held the title of neokoros — official keeper of an imperial cult temple — and by the mid-second century had accumulated multiple such honors, a fact this coin's legend advertises with civic pride. The unusual rendering of the zeta in ΝΕΟΚΟΡΩΝ, formed as a reversed or squared character resembling the Japanese katakana エ, is a die-cutter's idiosyncrasy rather than a scribal variant; it appears on a documented subset of issues from this mint and has been used as a die-identification marker in the specialist literature on Mysian bronzes.