Tetradrachm

Kyzikos, the prosperous Propontine city on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara, maintained an unusually assertive civic coinage well into the Hellenistic period — a period when many neighboring mints had effectively surrendered monetary independence to the great dynastic powers. These large silver tetradrachms belong to a phase of Kyzikene production influenced by the Attic weight standard, though the city had long been better known for its archaic electrum staters, which circulated as an international trading currency across the Greek world for centuries prior.

The "var." qualifications against multiple standard references suggest die combinations not precisely matched in any single corpus — not unusual for a mint producing at civic rather than royal scale.