Stater - Alexander III Kolchis imitation

The Bastarnae occupied a contested zone between the Celtic and Scythian worlds, and their gold staters imitating Alexander III's coinage reflect a political calculation as much as an economic one — Alexandrine types carried transactional weight across the Black Sea littoral and deep into the steppe far longer than the Macedonian kingdom itself survived. The Kolchis variants in particular represent a regional strand of this imitation tradition, diverging progressively from the prototype across successive die generations until the original types become barely legible.

The Bastarnae were recorded by Roman sources as early as the Macedonian wars of the second century BC, and their coinage tradition persisted well into the early imperial period.