Tetradrachm

Abdera's silver coinage begins here, in the decades immediately following the city's second foundation — the first Clazomenian settlement having failed, it was refounded by Teos around 545 BC after that city's population fled the advancing Persian army under Harpagus. The coins they struck upon arrival are among the earliest identifiable civic issues from Thrace, and the fabric of this tetradrachm reflects Ionian minting conventions transplanted wholesale to the northern Aegean littoral.

The city would later become infamous in antiquity as a byword for stupidity — an unfair reputation possibly rooted in inter-polis rivalry — but in this period Abdera was a prosperous port controlling access to Thracian silver sources.