Mytilene's electrum hektai were among the last coins in the Greek world to use electrum as a primary monetary metal — a tradition the city maintained stubbornly long after most mints had abandoned the alloy for pure gold or silver. The city struck these in matched obverse-reverse pairs, rotating designs across issues in a scheme that makes attribution to specific decades genuinely difficult without die studies. Bodenstedt's 1976 catalogue remains the foundational reference, numbering 105 types; type 94 falls toward the later sequence, placing it closer to the series' abrupt end when Macedonian economic dominance effectively killed independent Lesbian coinage.
Mytilene's electrum hektai were among the last coins in the Greek world to use electrum as a primary monetary metal — a tradition the city maintained stubbornly long after most mints had abandoned the alloy for pure gold or silver. The city struck these in matched obverse-reverse pairs, rotating designs across issues in a scheme that makes attribution to specific decades genuinely difficult without die studies. Bodenstedt's 1976 catalogue remains the foundational reference, numbering 105 types; type 94 falls toward the later sequence, placing it closer to the series' abrupt end when Macedonian economic dominance effectively killed independent Lesbian coinage.