Hekte

Mytilene's electrum hektes were struck in a long-running civic coinage program that persisted for roughly two centuries, with each emission pairing a new obverse type against a simpler incuse reverse — a production convention that makes individual emissions datable by type sequence rather than by inscription or magistrate name. The naturally occurring electrum used in the earliest issues, drawn from Lydian river sources, carries a gold-to-silver ratio that varies measurably across emissions, complicating modern die studies.

Bodenstedt's 1981 monograph remains the authoritative reference for this series, organizing over 100 emissions with a precision that earlier catalogs like the BMC could not achieve.