Drachm Zancle

Zancle — the city's original Sikanian name, meaning "sickle" in reference to the curved harbor — was a Chalkidian colony that by 500 BC had become one of the most strategically contested ports in Sicily. The coin's type belongs to the final years before Anaxilas of Rhegion seized the city around 489–488 BC, expelled the Samian settlers who had briefly occupied it, and renamed it Messana after his own homeland. That political rupture ended this coinage type definitively; what was struck before the takeover belongs to a different civic identity entirely.