Hekte

Mytilene and Phokaia operated a formal agreement — documented in ancient sources — to alternate electrum coinage production on a shared standard, one of the few known interstate monetary arrangements in the Greek world. The Mytilenean hekte series ran for roughly two centuries, with each successive type pairing a new obverse head against a fixed incuse square reverse, creating an almost numismatic catalog of artistic fashion across generations. Bodenstedt's systematic classification remains the standard reference, built largely from die studies rather than findspot evidence, which means the relative chronology of individual types like B58 is typological rather than archival.