Hemidrachm

Chersonese hemidrachms were struck in enormous quantities over decades to serve as the dominant trade currency of the Black Sea grain routes — a function so well understood in antiquity that they circulated far beyond Thrace, turning up in hoards from Egypt to Afghanistan. Their production was essentially industrial, with dies reused and recombined so freely that matching obverse and reverse pairs are the exception rather than the rule, which accounts for the bewildering proliferation of die varieties catalogued under BMC and Weber.

The "var." designations here are meaningful, not boilerplate — no two references agree on a complete die census for this type.