Hemidrachm

Chersonesos, the Thracian peninsula city, produced these hemidrachms in enormous quantities over roughly five decades, making them one of the most widely circulated fractional silver coinages in the entire Aegean trade network. Their ubiquity in hoards from Asia Minor to the Black Sea littoral suggests they functioned almost as a regional trade currency well beyond their city of issue.

The type is notorious among die students for its extraordinary variety — no two obverses appear to share identical incuse punch configurations, implying continuous die production across multiple generations of engravers without a standardizing template.