Tetradrachm Unfaithful Legend Type

Celtic coinage in the eastern Balkans descended from Macedonian prototypes — Philip II tetradrachms copied so persistently that the designs degraded through successive generations of imitation into near-abstraction. The "Unfaithful Legend" designation refers specifically to the garbled or pseudo-epigraphic inscription derived from Philip's original ΦΙΛΙΠΠΟΥ, rendered by celts who had no literacy in Greek into sequences of meaningless strokes and curves.

Attribution to a specific tribal group remains impossible. The Kostial reference places it within a broad Danubian tradition, but the actual striking location could fall anywhere across a wide arc from Thrace to the Carpathian basin.