Hekte

Mytilene and Phocaea operated under a formal agreement — likely dating to the fifth century — that standardized the weight and fineness of their electrum hektai, allowing coins from both cities to circulate interchangeably across Aegean trade networks. The arrangement is one of the few documented monetary treaties of the ancient Greek world. Mytilene's issues were struck in a remarkable unbroken succession of obverse-reverse pairings, each combination used only once, making the Bodenstedt typology one of the most precisely constructed references in Greek numismatics.