Hekte Ionia or Northern Greece

Electrum hektes of this period predate the invention of coinage by a comfortable margin in some scholarly frameworks — the debate over whether Lydia or the Greek Ionian cities deserve credit for striking the first coins remains unresolved, and pieces like this one sit at the center of that argument. The alloy itself was often naturally occurring electron from the Paktolus River, whose gold-bearing sands made western Anatolia the logical birthplace of coined money.