Drachm

Gaza sat at the southwestern terminus of the overland spice and incense routes from Arabia, and its fourth-century civic coinage reflects the commercial pressures of a city that needed credible silver currency more than it needed imperial permission to strike it. Operating under loose Achaemenid oversight, Philistian cities including Gaza issued their own fractional silver — drawing heavily on Athenian iconographic conventions precisely because Athenian owls were the trusted trade currency of the eastern Mediterranean, and imitation was commercially rational.

Gitler and Tal's exhaustive corpus of Philistian coinage identified multiple die pairings within the Gaza 9D group, distinguishing local production from the output of neighboring Ashdod and Ashkelon mints that were striking simultaneously.