Sestertius - Kotys II

Kotys II ruled the Bosporan Kingdom as a client king under Rome, and his coinage reflects that dependency precisely — his issues were struck in parallel with Hadrian's imperial visit to the eastern provinces, a tour that reshaped client relationships across the Black Sea littoral. The Bosporan sestertius denomination was itself an adaptation of Roman monetary vocabulary applied to a Greek civic tradition, producing a hybrid coinage that satisfied neither system fully but functioned adequately in the grain-trade economy that made the Cimmerian Bosporus strategically indispensable to Rome.

Anokhin's cataloguing of this type identified meaningful die linkages across the 129–130 issues, suggesting a concentrated mint effort rather than continuous production.