Drachm

Kyrene's economy in this period was built almost entirely on the export of silphium, a plant so valuable to the ancient Mediterranean world that the city held what amounted to a monopoly on its supply. The plant grew only in a narrow coastal strip of Libya and resisted every attempt at cultivation elsewhere. Rome's treasury would later stock it by the pound alongside gold.

The SNG Copenhagen and BMC references place this piece among the earliest coinage from the mint, predating the city's absorption into the Ptolemaic sphere by nearly two centuries.