Obol

Ashkelon operated as a Philistine coastal city under Achaemenid administrative control during this period, and its small silver fractions were struck primarily to facilitate local commerce and tax payments within the Persian satrapy of Abar-Nahara. The city maintained unusual monetary autonomy for a Levantine port, producing its own typology rather than simply circulating Persian sigloi. Gitler and Tal's classification of this issue reflects decades of die-study work distinguishing the Ashkelon series from visually similar Philistian and Samarian fractions — a notoriously difficult attribution problem given the coin's minimal striking surface.