Tetradrachm - Iphiades

Abydos, the strategically critical Hellespontine city controlling the narrowest point of the strait, had a long history of issuing civic coinage — but by the first century BC, autonomous silver production in this region was becoming increasingly constrained by Roman commercial dominance and the disruptions of the Mithridatic Wars. This tetradrachm, issued under the magistrate Iphiades, belongs to a late civic series struck when such locally-authorized issues were already a fading practice across much of western Asia Minor.

The magistrate-name series at Abydos is documented across a relatively small corpus, with individual named issues sometimes represented by only a handful of specimens across major collections.