Diobol - Protes

Abdera, the Thracian coastal colony founded by Teos refugees in the mid-sixth century, organized its silver coinage around a rotating magistracy system in which an annually appointed civic official — the protes — had his name struck onto the issue. This makes each Abderan coin a datable administrative document as much as a monetary object, and the referenced May type sits within a sequence that numismatists have used to reconstruct the city's magistrate lists for the first half of the fourth century.

The city's prosperity during this period owed much to its position on Thracian trade routes and its control of timber and slave commerce. Abdera was also the birthplace of Democritus, whose atomic philosophy was being formulated in precisely these decades.