Hekte

Mytilene and neighboring Phokaia operated a formal agreement — confirmed by surviving examples and referenced in ancient sources — to jointly produce electrum hektes on a shared standard, one of the few documented inter-city minting arrangements in the Greek world. This particular issue predates that compact, placing it among the earliest independently struck Mytilenean fractions, when the city was still navigating its position between Lydian economic influence and emerging Aegean trade networks.

The natural electrum alloy used in this period was not artificially controlled to a fixed gold-silver ratio — that standardization came later.