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Tetrachalkon

Issuer Olympia
Year 175 BC - 125 BC
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Diameter 20.0 mm
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Obverse description Laureate head of Zeus facing right, rendered in bold relief with a mature bearded visage and flowing hair secured beneath an olive wreath. The portrait displays strong, idealized classical features characteristic of Elean civic coinage. A partial beaded border is visible along the coin's left periphery.
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Edge Plain
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Additional information

Olympia's civic bronze issues of this period were tied directly to the quadrennial festival cycle — production almost certainly ramped up in the years preceding each Olympiad to meet the transactional demands of the sanctuary's enormous temporary population. Merchants, pilgrims, and athletes converging from across the Greek world required small change, and the local coinage filled that role within the sacred precinct and its immediate surroundings.

The BCD Peloponnesos collection, from which the reference specimen derives, remains the definitive private assemblage for understanding regional bronze coinage of the Peloponnese; Triton IX in 2006 dispersed it and reset scholarly pricing benchmarks for issues exactly like this one.

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