Hemidrachm

The Lycian League's early coinage predates the formal confederation that later became celebrated in antiquity — Montesquieu and the American founders both cited the League's republican structure as a model — but these archaic-period issues belong to a looser political arrangement among the dynastic city-states of Lycia before Persian imperial pressure forced greater regional cohesion after the Ionian Revolt. The hemidrachm fraction served interregional trade along the southwestern Anatolian coast, where Lycian, Greek, and Phoenician commercial networks overlapped.