Litra

Motya was obliterated by Dionysius I of Syracuse in 397 BC — the city burned, its population killed or enslaved, and the site never meaningfully resettled. Coins struck in the years immediately before that siege are among the last physical objects produced by a functioning Motyian civic economy. This litra falls squarely in that terminal window.

The litra denomination was native to Sicily, rooted in a pre-Greek weight standard the Phoenician colonists adapted for local exchange.