Tetradrachm

After Attalos III died without an heir in 133 BC and bequeathed his kingdom directly to Rome, Pergamon did not immediately vanish as a minting authority. The city continued striking civic coinage under the newly formed province of Asia, maintaining its own monetary tradition even as Roman administration tightened around it. These so-called "cistophoric" tetradrachms — named for the cista mystica imagery type dominant in the region — circulated as the workhorse currency of the province for decades, accepted by Rome as a de facto provincial standard at a fixed exchange rate of three cistophori to one Roman denarius.

The SNG von Aulock 1347 attribution places this piece within a well-documented sequence, though die studies by Kleiner and Noe identified considerable variation across the Pergamene series that catalog numbers alone obscure.