Tetradrachm / 2 Shekels - Alexander III Babylon

Struck at Babylon in the final years of Alexander's campaign, these tetradrachms were produced to pay the army that had pushed east beyond the Achaemenid heartland into Bactria and the Punjab. Babylon became a primary mint precisely because Alexander seized its enormous bullion reserves after defeating Darius III — the Persian treasury effectively funded Macedonian conquest in coin form. The Babylon mint was among the most prolific of the eastern issues, and die links within this series have been extensively studied by Price, whose 1991 corpus remains the foundation for attribution work.