Stater - Lysimachos Kolchis imitation

The Bastarnae occupied the lower Danube region and Black Sea steppe margins — a population consistently described by ancient sources as Germanic in origin but thoroughly Scythianized in material culture. Their gold coinage borrowed the authority of Lysimachos of Thrace, whose posthumous stater types had circulated as prestige currency across the northern Pontic world for centuries after his death at Korupedion in 281 BC. Kolchis imitations of this type represent a distinct regional branch, progressively abstracted from the prototype through successive copying.

The Castelin and Arslan references together place this piece within a well-documented but numerically small corpus.