Tetradrachm

Ainos was a prosperous Aeolian colony at the mouth of the Hebros River, and its silver coinage of the 430s BC falls squarely within the disruption of the Peloponnesian War — a conflict that throttled Aegean trade routes and forced many Thracian coastal cities to assert commercial identity through their coinage more aggressively than before. The city's position gave it unusual leverage: control of the river mouth meant toll income and grain transit, which funded the mint.

The May corpus remains the authoritative die study for this series. May #114 represents a relatively tight chronological window of no more than two to three years of production.