Tetradrachm

These issues fall within the period when Athens was consolidating its naval dominance following Salamis, and the silver funding that expansion came directly from the Laurion mines in southern Attica — a seam rich enough that Themistocles had persuaded the Athenian assembly in 483 BC to invest the windfall into warships rather than distribute it as citizen dividends. The tetradrachm became the working currency of that entire enterprise.

The type's die-cutting remained deliberately archaic well past the point when other mints had modernized, a conscious conservatism that made Athenian coins immediately recognizable across the Aegean and into Egypt and the Levant.