Dichalkos Prow of galley

Arados — the Phoenician island city whose autonomy outlasted most of its neighbors — issued bronze fractions continuously through the Seleucid period while carefully maintaining its own civic coinage. This piece falls within a window when Arados was navigating the aftermath of Antiochus III's defeat at Magnesia in 190 BC, a moment that reshuffled power across the Levantine coast and gave coastal cities renewed room to assert local monetary independence. The city's position on a small island roughly two kilometers offshore made it militarily defensible and commercially indispensable, two qualities that kept its mint active when others went dark.