Hekte

Mytilene and Phocaea operated under a formal agreement — confirmed by surviving treaty fragments — that regulated the alternating production of their electrum coinages to avoid market saturation. The Mytilenean hekte series ran across discrete emission groups, each distinguished by obverse type pairings, and Bodenstedt's classification system remains the primary tool for sorting them. This particular emission, B46, falls within a productive mid-fifth century phase when Lesbos sat commercially between Aegean and Anatolian trade networks.

The natural electrum alloy used at Mytilene was not artificially adjusted to a fixed gold-silver ratio, unlike later Lydian practice.