Drachm - Philo...

Sinope was the dominant Greek colonial city on the Black Sea's southern shore, and its silver coinage circulated widely across Pontic trade networks connecting the Greek world to Scythian and Anatolian markets. The city controlled significant timber and fish-salting industries, and its mint output reflects that commercial weight. This drachm type, attributed to the magistrate Philo, belongs to a series where individual civic officials signed issues — a practice that assigned accountability and likely prestige to the minting authority.

The SNG BM Black Sea corpus remains the primary reference for Black Sea colonial coinage precisely because this material was systematically underrepresented in earlier standard references.