Obol

Side was a prosperous Greek colony on the Pamphylian coast whose mint operated with notable independence — the city retained its own non-Greek script on coinage long after Hellenization, a linguistic stubbornness unmatched among regional mints. At the obol denomination, these pieces served the smallest daily transactions of a port economy heavily involved in the grain and slave trades. The SNG France sequence documents meaningful die variation across this range, and attributing individual specimens requires close attention to pomegranate die pairings rather than relying on type alone.