Stater

Smyrna's gold staters from this period sit at the very beginning of Western coinage history, produced in Lydia's commercial orbit at a moment when struck coin was still a novelty technology. The city's output was almost certainly tied to trade along the Aegean coast rather than state fiscal needs — the early Lydian and Ionian issues circulated as commodity money by weight before any standardized monetary system existed.

The BMC 39 attribution places this among a small, closely studied group. Survivors in any condition are genuinely rare; most known examples passed through 19th-century excavations with incomplete provenance.