Tetradrachm

Ainos — a Thracian coastal city at the mouth of the Hebros river — controlled access to lucrative inland trade routes and maintained enough commercial autonomy to strike some of the finest silver coinage in the northern Aegean throughout the fifth and fourth centuries. The city's output shrank dramatically after the Macedonian expansion under Philip II brought the region under tighter control, which brackets the later end of this series with some precision.

May's corpus remains the authoritative die study for Ainos coinage. References 415–416 within his classification correspond to a well-documented emission grouping, with the 3.2 / 1278 cross-reference indicating a specific die pairing traceable across surviving specimens in European collections.