Hekte

Mytilene and Phocaea operated a formal agreement — documented in ancient sources and confirmed by hoard distribution — to jointly produce electrum coinage on a shared standard, one of the few inter-city monetary arrangements of the archaic Greek world. This hekte predates that later agreement, placing it among Mytilene's earliest independent electrum issues, struck when Lesbos was still navigating the shadow of Lydian and then Persian hegemony over the Ionian coast.

The electrum itself is naturally occurring alloy from the Lydian sphere, and the precise gold-to-silver ratio varies between dies — a known inconsistency in Bodenstedt's classification of this type.