Hekte

Phokaia was among the first Greek cities to strike electrum coinage, and its issues predate the broader adoption of coinage across the Aegean by decades. The city's access to naturally occurring electrum — an alloy of gold and silver found in the riverbeds of Lydia — gave Ionian mints a head start that mainland Greek cities could not replicate without importing the metal. Phokaia and Mytilene eventually formalized a shared coinage agreement, likely in the early fourth century, but these earlier autonomous hektes predate that arrangement entirely.

Bodenstedt 18 places this type in the middle sequence of Phokaian electrum production, before the Persian destruction of the city in 546 BC effectively ended its independent mint for a generation.