Bronze AE

Olbia, the Greek colony at the mouth of the Hypanis river on the northwest Black Sea coast, had an unusually long and experimental relationship with bronze coinage. Before cast bronze dolphins and wheel-shaped pieces gave way to struck coinage, the city's monetary production was among the most idiosyncratic in the Greek world. This issue falls in the transitional fifth-to-fourth century period when Olbia was navigating both Scythian pressure from the steppe interior and shifting commercial relationships with Athens and the wider Aegean.

The Anokhin 243 attribution places this piece within a sequence tied to the city's autonomous civic issues before Macedonian influence reached the northern Pontic region in the following century.