Tetradrachm

Tenedos controlled one of the most strategically valuable straits in the ancient world — the approach to the Hellespont — and extracted considerable wealth from the maritime traffic passing through. These late tetradrachms, struck in the declining decades of autonomous island coinage, were produced as Pontic and later Roman power reshaped the Aegean's political order. The island formally came under Roman provincial administration during this same period, making the continued assertion of civic coinage a pointed act of institutional persistence.

Callataÿ's die study places this emission among the final substantial silver issues of the series, with a relatively restricted die count suggesting limited but deliberate production.