Obol

Cilicia in the fourth century was a patchwork of semi-autonomous cities operating under loose Achaemenid suzerainty, many of which struck small silver fractions to facilitate local trade without ever asserting a clear civic identity on the coinage itself. The inability to firmly attribute pieces like this one — despite decades of systematic cataloguing by Levante, Klein, and others — reflects how deliberately anonymous some of these mints were, possibly to avoid drawing administrative attention from Persian satraps collecting tribute.