One of the most direct ways to learn how an ancient kingdom saw itself is to look at the coins it struck. A coin was a means of payment, but it was also a small proclamation that fitted in the palm of the hand, an official document that carried the ruler's face and his gods to distant lands, and very often a work of art from the hand of a skilled die engraver. The rulers of the Kingdom of Pontus, who used Amaseia as their capital for about a century, announced the claims of their dynasty through the gold and silver coins they issued, and in doing so left behind one of the most striking portrait series of the Hellenistic age. From the wrinkled brow of the aged Mithridates III to the windswept hair of Mithridates VI Eupator, so reminiscent of Alexander the Great, these coins allow us to follow step by step how a dynasty made its way between its Iranian roots and the Greek world.

For a long time the royal coins of Pontus were remembered only for the beauty of their portraits. Over the last half century, however, die studies, hoard records and metal analyses have begun to show how many of these coins were struck, where they circulated and for what purpose they were issued. The picture that emerges is that the first kings struck very few coins, while the last great king, Mithridates VI, raised coin production to extraordinary levels. The city coins that Amaseia issued in its own name in the imperial period, after passing under Roman rule, are the subject of a separate article; only the coinage of the royal age is treated here.

Coinage in Pontus before the Kingdom

Before the Pontic kingdom was founded, the places that struck coins on the southern shore of the Black Sea were almost exclusively Greek colonial cities. Sinope was issuing silver drachms in the 5th century BC and long remained the only mint in the region; Amisos, which for a time bore the name Peiraieus after being resettled from Athens, produced silver drachms in the 4th century BC showing a female head wearing a turreted crown and an owl on a shield. In the period after Alexander, Amisos continued to strike drachms and triobols of similar types that did not carry the city's name. Older catalogues record that some of these coins show traces pointing to the authority of the Pontic kings. The Belgian numismatist François de Callataÿ argues that, although these silver issues of Sinope and Amisos look like civic coins, they were not struck to facilitate everyday trade but were issued under the control of an authority above the city, such as the satrapy, during the period of Persian rule.

According to Callataÿ, Pontus, where almost no bronze money was struck and only large silver coins are known, remained from the 5th to the 2nd century BC a region in which money hardly entered the everyday economy. One of the most interesting pieces of evidence supporting this view was found near Amasya. The find made in 1939 in the lands of the village of Kürtler, known in scholarship as the Kirazlı hoard, had been buried around 230-220 BC. It contained 13 gold staters and 822 silver coins; 740 of the silver pieces were of the Alexander type, and the rest consisted of coins of Seleucus and Lysimachus together with a few coins of Sinope. There was not a single Pontic coin in the hoard. Of the silver coins, 636, or about 77.5 percent, bore chisel cuts made to test whether the metal was genuine. Georges Le Rider, who published the hoard, wrote that if we accept that these cuts were made near the place where the coins were buried, we must conclude that the use of money had not yet become widespread in some districts of Pontus.

The First Royal Coins and the Question of Attribution

The earliest known coin of the Pontic kings is a gold stater with the helmeted head of Athena on the obverse and a standing Nike holding a wreath on the reverse. The vertical inscription on the reverse means "of King Mithradates"; it should be noted here that the kings' names were written as Mithradates on their own coins and in Greek inscriptions, while the spelling Mithridates comes from Latin sources. The type directly imitates the gold staters of Alexander the Great and does not carry the star and crescent emblem seen on almost all later royal coins. Only two examples of these coins are known today; one is in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris and is recorded as having been found at ancient Kotyora, modern Ordu.

Which king the stater belongs to was debated for a long time. Deniz Burcu Erciyas assigns the coin to the founder of the kingdom, Mithridates I Ktistes, and suggests that it may date from his victory in 281 BC over Diodorus, a general of Seleucus, or from the days after the deaths of Lysimachus and Seleucus when he was able to proclaim himself king. Barclay Head's classic numismatic handbook, Historia Numorum, gives the same type to Mithridates II and records that no coins are known for Mithridates I or Ariobarzanes. Callataÿ, on the other hand, attributes the staters to Mithridates III. His strongest evidence is that the four control marks seen on the Paris specimen also appear in the same positions on a series of silver coins bearing the name of Amisos. In Callataÿ's view this shows that the royal issue was struck at the mint of Amisos, not at Amaseia, the capital at the time, and that the Pontic kings were able to use the Amisos mint for their own needs. As the occasion for the issue he proposes the unsuccessful attempt of Mithridates III to seize Sinope around 220 BC and the payments to be made to the mercenaries hired during it.

The order of the kings has also been debated on the basis of the coins. Harold Mattingly, claiming that the tetradrachms of Mithridates III found in two Seleucid hoards were very well preserved, argued that these coins actually belonged to the first phase of Mithridates IV and that Mithridates III never struck coins at all. Erciyas, relying on the control marks in the Amasya hoard, leans towards this view. Callataÿ, however, shows that these tetradrachms are not well preserved but on the contrary worn, corroded or broken; he adds that the portrait of Mithridates III cannot be reconciled with that of Mithridates IV, that the king on these coins clearly looks older, and that the weights also support the classical order. The median weight of the tetradrachms of Mithridates III is 16.97 grams, that of Pharnaces 16.85 grams and that of Mithridates IV 16.83 grams, a sequence that fits the slow decline of tetradrachm weights during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Callataÿ's conclusion is firm: Mattingly's daring proposal is best set aside.

The Age of Realistic Portraits

Mithridates III

The first Pontic king to place his own portrait on his coins was Mithridates III, usually dated to the years 220-200 BC. The obverse of his tetradrachms bears the diademed head or bust of the king, and the reverse shows Zeus seated on his throne holding an eagle and a sceptre. This Zeus is taken directly from the famous reverse type of Alexander's tetradrachms, but the king had a mark of his own added in the left field: an eight-rayed star with a crescent. From then on this emblem would appear on all the gold and silver royal coins of Pontus until the end of the kingdom.

What is truly striking is the portrait on the obverse. With his receding hairline, deeply furrowed brow, drooping moustache and close-cropped beard, the king is shown as an old man who has received none of the idealisation found in Hellenistic royal portraits. There is no doubt that the engraver who cut the die was Greek, but the face that results is far removed from Greek ideals of beauty. The Danish numismatist Otto Mørkholm wrote that the Pontic kings, who were proud of their Iranian descent and remained attached to their oriental roots even after marrying into the Seleucid dynasty, gave excellent Greek die engravers the opportunity to create a gallery of portraits with no real parallel in Hellenistic portraiture. In Mørkholm's view these portraits equal the best Bactrian portraits in realism and surpass them in psychological insight. A tetradrachm of Mithridates III that Mørkholm purchased in 1978 for the Copenhagen coin cabinet adorns the cover of his posthumously published book Early Hellenistic Coinage. The disparaging comments that older art historians made about these "oriental" faces are rightly criticised today.

Two staters, nineteen tetradrachms and two drachms are known in the name of Mithridates III. Two of the tetradrachms come from the Latakia hoard, found in Syria in 1759 and regarded as the first hoard of Greek coins ever published, and one comes from a hoard found at Babylon in 1900. One specimen is also associated with the Amasya hoard that came to light in 1860. These tetradrachms were imitated for many years with dies made by the notorious forger Becker, and forged examples found their way into some museums.

Pharnaces I and the Disputed Deity

Pharnaces I, who captured Sinope in 183 BC and moved the capital from Amaseia to that harbour city, was one of the most ambitious rulers of the kingdom. The years of his reign are given differently in the sources; Callataÿ accepts about 200-169 BC, Erciyas 189/188-160 BC and Historia Numorum about 185-169 BC. On his coins Pharnaces appears as a middle-aged man with short hair and prominent sideburns or a short beard, and his portrait is as realistic as that of his predecessor. Callataÿ's catalogue lists one stater, twenty-four tetradrachms and sixteen drachms in the name of Pharnaces; judging by the number of dies, he is the Pontic king who struck the most coins.

The reverse of the coins of Pharnaces carries one of the strangest types in Hellenistic numismatics. The figure, standing and facing the viewer, wears a broad-brimmed flat hat, a chiton and a chlamys, and has laced boots on his feet. In his left hand he holds a cornucopia and the herald's staff of Hermes, the kerykeion, and in his right a vine branch on which a young deer nibbles. On some tetradrachms a horizontal thunderbolt appears above the figure's head. The identity of this deity has never been settled with certainty. Some scholars described him as a "pantheistic" god combining the attributes of all the gods; Men Pharnakou, worshipped at Ameria between Amasya and Tokat and the god in whose name the kings swore their oaths, came to mind, but Warwick Wroth and Brian McGing abandoned this interpretation on the grounds that the figure does not carry the usual attributes of that god. Elke Summerer, in her study of 1995, defended the Men interpretation once again. The cornucopia the figure holds and the fact that it feeds a deer have led some writers to think that it might be Ma, the great goddess of Comana.

The coins of Pharnaces were known beyond the borders of the kingdom as well. In the inventory of the temple of Apollo on Delos from about 162 BC and in that of the temple of Artemis from about 141 BC, coins described as "tetradrachms of Pharnaces" are recorded among the offerings. A tetradrachm of Pharnaces also turned up in a large hoard of 2,500-3,000 silver coins found near Larissa in Thessaly in 1968.

Mithridates IV, Laodice and Mithridates V

Under Mithridates IV Philopator Philadelphus, the brother and successor of Pharnaces, around 169-150 BC, the reverses of the coins became markedly more Greek. The king's first tetradrachms show Perseus for the first time on Pontic coins: the hero, wearing a helmet, a chlamys and winged sandals, stands facing the viewer, holding in one hand the severed head of Medusa and in the other the sickle-shaped sword known as the harpe. Perseus was a Greek hero, but according to Herodotus he was also regarded as the ancestor of the Persians through his son Perses. This figure, who represented both worlds at once, suited the dual identity of the Pontic dynasty perfectly and would become one of the favourite subjects of the coinage under Mithridates VI.

After Mithridates IV married his sister Laodice, tetradrachms were struck showing on the obverse the jugate busts of the king and queen side by side, and on the reverse Zeus and Hera standing with their sceptres. The inscription names the two together with the title Philadelphoi, "sibling-loving". This double portrait format was borrowed from the coins of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which since Ptolemy II had deified its kings and queens together; in the same period the Seleucid king Alexander Balas and the Cappadocian king Ariarathes also had coins struck together with their wives. Only five examples of these joint coins are known, and some of them come from the Samsun hoard found in 1900. A single tetradrachm struck with the veiled portrait of the queen alone, with Hera on the reverse, is in Paris. Historia Numorum was inclined to attribute this coin to the mother of Mithridates VI, who acted as regent during her son's childhood, but the similarity of the portraits suggests that she is Laodice, the wife of Mithridates IV.

A gold stater bearing the name of Laodice, sold at auction in 2001 for 220,000 Swiss francs, has however aroused serious doubts. Callataÿ points out that the reverse has a six-rayed star instead of the unvarying eight-rayed star and crescent of the Mithridatic dynasty, that the double cornucopia looks like a copy of Ptolemaic models made without understanding them, that the epithet "Epiphanes" is not found for a queen on any other Greek coin, and that the surface is astonishingly flat, as on modern forgeries. There is no conclusive proof that the coin is a forgery, but according to Callataÿ there are many reasons to be suspicious of it.

Of Mithridates V Euergetes (about 150-120 BC), known as a friend of Rome and honoured with statues on Delos, only a single tetradrachm is known today. This coin, now in Athens and donated to the museum in 1976, shows the diademed head of the king on the obverse and a standing Apollo holding a bow on the reverse. Erciyas considers Mithridates V the first Pontic king to adopt a relatively idealised portrait and believes he wished to emphasise his Greek side; this tendency would become fully established under his son Mithridates VI.

A Sparingly Struck Coinage

Callataÿ's die study, published in 2009, brings together all the coins known today of the Pontic kings before Mithridates VI: four staters, sixty-four tetradrachms and eighteen drachms. In other words, from about a century of coinage by an important Hellenistic dynasty fewer than a hundred coins survive. This scarcity also slowed the development of numismatic research. By 1850 only two of the eleven or twelve types known today had been recognised; the staters of Mithridates III could be published only in 1888, the staters of Pharnaces in 1973 and the tetradrachm of Mithridates V in 1976.

Calculations based on the number of dies indicate that in the roughly seventy years between 220 and 150 BC the Pontic kings struck tetradrachms with at most some thirty obverse dies. Mithridates VI, in the thirty years between about 97 and 67 BC, used more than six times as many, about 190 dies. In the neighbouring kingdom of Bithynia some 450 dies are thought to have been cut for royal tetradrachms between 128/127 and 74/73 BC. Assuming that each die produced 20,000 coins, Callataÿ calculates the annual output of the first Pontic kings at about 34,000 drachms, an amount sufficient to pay some 113 mercenaries earning 300 drachms a year in newly struck coin.

The hoards support the same conclusion. Five hoards from before Mithridates VI containing royal coins are known, and three of them were found in very distant places such as Thessaly, Syria and Babylon. The most important example from Pontic territory is the Amasya hoard, which came to light in 1860 and had been buried around 185-170 BC; among its more than 300 silver coins were four or five tetradrachms and one drachm of Pharnaces. By contrast, the hoard of more than 207 tetradrachms found at Ordu in 1970 and buried after 150 BC did not yield a single Pontic royal coin. The early Pontic kings did not strike bronze money either; in this respect they differ clearly from the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties, which put large amounts of bronze into circulation, and from neighbouring Bithynia. In Callataÿ's view these kings did not pursue a monetary policy aimed at encouraging trade or easing the small transactions of their people. Their coins were most probably struck in limited quantities for military purposes, to pay mercenaries, and for that reason the propaganda value of their imagery should not be overstated.

The Star and Crescent

The eight-rayed star and crescent that appear on all Pontic royal coins from Mithridates III onwards are accepted as the emblem of the dynasty. Historia Numorum defines the sign as the sun and moon symbol of the House of Mithridates, which claimed Persian descent. The emblem's link with the dynasty is certain, but what it represents is disputed. The German scholar Gerhard Kleiner regarded it as the symbol of a native deity, the moon god Men, and thought it represented night and day, that is, the moon and the sun. Ritter suggested that it could be connected with the Perseus myth, as with the Macedonian star. Martin Price associated the emblem with Ma, the goddess of Comana, and other writers with Mithras. Eckart Olshausen saw in it a fusion of Pontic and Iranian visual traditions: the crescent represented Men and the star Ahura Mazda. This interpretation also accords with the kings' view of themselves as heirs of a line connected with Persian tradition and with the world of Ahura Mazda, the god of light of Zoroastrianism.

Summerer argues that the sole source of the symbol was Men. Strabo reports that the kings swore their oaths in the name of Men Pharnakou, which points to a strong bond between the god and the dynasty. Erciyas adds an overlooked detail to this debate: on a 3rd-century BC coin of the city of Amastris on the Paphlagonian coast an eight-rayed star identical to the Mithridatic star appears beside Aphrodite, and the same star recurs on two later coin types of Amastris. According to Erciyas, this shows that the star was already associated with the Pontic royal family in the 3rd century BC.

The Coins of Mithridates VI Eupator

A Portrait in the Image of Alexander

Mithridates VI Eupator, who came to the throne in 120 BC and reigned until 63 BC, transformed Pontic coinage in both quantity and quality. On his gold and silver coins the king appears as a young man with long, wavy hair bound by a diadem, long sideburns, a prominent nose and a narrow forehead. The treatment of the hair and the gaze was deliberately brought close to portraits of Alexander the Great. This idealised style moves away from the realistic oriental portraits of his ancestors towards the common Hellenistic royal type, and it is thought to have been intended to place the Pontic king on the same level as the other Hellenistic kings. McGing suggests that by choosing a more idealised portrait the king wished to show his people that he was the new Alexander who would liberate Asia. According to Justin, before the First Mithridatic War Mithridates told his soldiers that he was descended on his mother's side from Alexander and Seleucus, and on his father's side from the Persian kings Cyrus and Darius.

These tetradrachms carry no inscription on the obverse, which makes the king's face even more prominent. On the reverse a grazing animal is shown together with the star and crescent, and the whole scene is surrounded by a Dionysiac wreath of ivy leaves and bunches of grapes. The inscription reads "of King Mithradates Eupator" or simply "of King Eupator". The wreath is no accident: in some inscriptions the king is named Mithradates Eupator Dionysus, and the fact that Dionysus was a god who had come from the East made it easier to link him with the king's own eastern origins. Erciyas, drawing on Appian, notes that the king may also have taken this name in tribute to his maternal ancestor, the Syrian king Antiochus VI Dionysus.

Pegasus and Stag

The grazing animal on the reverse of the tetradrachms is of two kinds: the winged horse Pegasus and the stag. According to the explanation proposed by Martin Price, which was long generally accepted, the relatively individual portrait of the king was used with Pegasus in the first type, and his portrait more closely resembling Alexander was used with the stag in the second. Price believes that the king abandoned Pegasus after conquering western Anatolia in 89/88 BC, because Pegasus, born from the severed neck of Medusa and associated with Perseus, the mythical ancestor of the Persians, was too "Persian" a symbol. The stag, the symbol of Ephesian Artemis, appealed more to the people of the newly conquered Greek cities. The German historian Adolf Holm had also linked the appearance of the stag with the conquest of 88 BC.

The dated coins complicate this neat picture to some extent. Just as collection records include a stag tetradrachm dated to August 95 BC, Pegasus tetradrachms dated by the Pontic calendar to 89-88, 85-84 and even 75 BC are also known. A Pegasus tetradrachm in the Art Institute of Chicago is dated to the ninth month of year 208, that is, 90-89 BC. Erciyas also points out that the deer was not new in Pontic imagery, recalling the young deer on the coins of Pharnaces and the coins of the Pontic cities with Artemis on the obverse and a stag on the reverse; Amisos and Amaseia both have examples of this type. Price's explanation may well have captured a political tendency correctly, but it cannot be said that the use of the two animals followed one another strictly from a particular date.

Coins Dated by Year and Month

The silver coins of Mithridates VI were, in Callataÿ's words, the most precisely dated coins of the known world. The year was placed above the monogram in the right field, and the month in the exergue. The calendar used was the Bithynian-Pontic era, which began with the first Bithynian king Zipoites I in 297 BC and started its year in the autumn. It is thought that Mithridates adopted this calendar in honour of his alliance with the Bithynian king Nicomedes III, probably during the Paphlagonian campaign of 108 BC, and that it was in use in Pontus by 96 BC at the latest. Dated issues begin in 96/95 BC. For example, a coin showing year 222 in the right field and the tenth month in the exergue is known to have been struck at Pergamon in July 75 BC; another example dated to the twelfth month of year 223 corresponds to September 74 BC.

The dated coins also show that the king adjusted his coinage to the calendar of his wars. According to Price's findings, heavy minting took place before the first two Mithridatic Wars, in 93/92, 92/91 and 90/89, and in 76/75 and 75/74 BC. During the first war minting continued at the same rate at three mints, declined between the two wars and stopped after the second war, which ended in defeat. These large issues met the king's need for cash to pay his enormous armies, and for this reason some coins of this period were struck hastily, with areas left flat. Callataÿ calculates that Mithridates VI increased the rate of coin production ten to twenty times over that of his ancestors.

A story about the king's birth was also reflected on small bronze coins. According to Justin, following Pompeius Trogus, two comets shone in the sky for seventy days in the year Mithridates was born. Small bronzes dated to 119-100 BC, whose mint is not known with certainty and which were perhaps struck at Amisos, show an eight-rayed star over a horse's head facing right on the obverse and a twelve-rayed comet on the reverse.

Coins Struck in Other Names during the War Years

Alongside the coins bearing his own name, Mithridates VI also made use of the familiar currencies of the Hellenistic world. During the First Mithridatic War, in 88-86 BC, gold staters were struck in the name of Lysimachus, Alexander's successor and king of Thrace, at the mints of Callatis, Istros, Tomis and Byzantium on the western Black Sea coast. Their obverses show the deified Alexander with the horn of Ammon, and their reverses a seated Athena holding Nike. Some scholars see in the head of Alexander on these staters the features of Mithridates or of his son Ariarathes. At the mint of Odessos, on silver tetradrachms struck in the name of Alexander, the head of Heracles wearing the lion skin was rendered with the features of Mithridates. These coins are interpreted as showing that the king was claiming the legacy of Lysimachus and Alexander and had designs on the former lands of the Diadochi in Thrace.

After the conquest of western Anatolia, Pergamon became one of the king's important mints. Gold staters with the monogram of Pergamon were struck while the king was resident there, and stag staters dated to the second year of the Pergamene era, that is 88/87 BC, were issued. The coins of his son Ariarathes IX, whom Mithridates placed on the throne of Cappadocia, also show the family tie; the first portrait type closely resembles his father's, and the reverse again shows a grazing Pegasus with the star and crescent. Friedrich Imhoof-Blumer argued that this portrait actually belonged to Mithridates VI, while Otto Mørkholm attributed the difference to two separate mints and two separate die engravers.

Two coins found in Italy have also been associated with the name of Mithridates. In 88 BC the Italian allies who had risen against Rome, and the Samnites in particular, had asked Mithridates for help. On a silver coin with the bust of Italia on the obverse and two figures in military dress shaking hands on the reverse, the figure on the right is thought, because of the globe in his hand, to be a king, most probably Mithridates. A gold coin with the young Dionysus on the obverse and the mystic basket of Dionysus with a thyrsus on the reverse repeats the type of the Pontic city bronzes, and its weight is the same as that of Mithridates' tetradrachms. According to Diodorus, Mithridates told the Italians that he would help them after he had subdued the provinces of Asia, but this help never came; the coins are therefore regarded as documents of a hope that was never realised.

Copper and Brass

The Pontic mints also innovated in the metal of their coins. Under Mithridates VI coins of pure copper and of brass were struck. Brass was an alloy rarely used in antiquity, and for a long time the first brass coins were thought to have been struck by the Romans in the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus. Analyses carried out in the 1970s revealed that some "bronze" coins of Mithridates were in fact of brass and that this alloy was used in coinage about half a century before the Romans. Phrygia and Bithynia are named as the sources of the raw material for the brass. These metals, valued above their intrinsic worth, may have partly taken the place of silver in financing the wars. It has been suggested that the Romans took advantage of the wide circulation of these new forms of currency in the monetary reform of Augustus in 23 BC.

The City Bronzes and the Mint of Amaseia

With the accession of Pharnaces I most of the cities of Pontus had lost their autonomy and their right to strike coins. Mithridates VI restored this privilege to the cities but kept control in his own hands. The bronze coins of the new period do not carry the king's name or portrait, and only the name of the city is written on the reverse; on the other hand, different cities use exactly the same types. This uniformity shows that a central authority directed the mints according to a programme aimed at unifying the region. Amaseia, Abonuteichos, Cabeira, Chabakta, Comana, Laodiceia and Taulara, which had never struck coins before, began minting in this period; Gaziura is known to have struck coins earlier as well. Together with Amisos, Amastris and Sinope, most of these cities used the same five types: aegis with Gorgon's head and Nike, head of Zeus and eagle on a thunderbolt, helmeted Ares and sheathed sword, Athena and Perseus holding the head of Medusa, and Dionysus and thyrsus.

In 1912 Imhoof-Blumer divided these bronzes into five chronological groups, and this classification largely coincides with the periods of 125-100, 100-85 and 85-65 BC defined in the British Museum catalogue. According to this classification, Amisos, Amaseia, Cabeira and Sinope were the first four cities to begin striking the Mithridatic types in the 120s BC. On the bronzes of Amaseia the city's name is written ΑΜΑΣΕΙΑΣ, "of the Amaseians"; the reading ΑΜΑΣΣΙΑΣ also occurs in some publications. Among the city's known types are the head of Zeus with an eagle on a thunderbolt, the head of the young Ares with a sheathed sword, and a bust of the young Perseus with a cornucopia between the caps of the Dioscuri, each surmounted by a star. The Zeus and eagle type recalls the sanctuary of Zeus Stratios in the territory of Amaseia and the kings' devotion to the "Zeus of armies". The types alluding to Perseus emphasised the king's Persian descent on both royal and civic coins. Coins of Amaseia have also turned up occasionally in a hoard found on Euboea and dated between 170 and 65 BC, and in the Khortitsa hoard in Ukraine.

Why these bronzes were struck is also debated. Callataÿ, drawing attention to the fact that some mint sites such as Pimolisa and Taulara were fortresses rather than even cities, believes that these issues had nothing to do with municipal autonomy and were struck primarily to pay soldiers in garrisons; he connects this with the frequency with which Mithridatic bronzes are found in the Bosporan territories of the Crimea. In the Bosporus the king appears to have struck only bronze, marking it with a monogram formed from the initials of his title "King Eupator". Some studies claim that Amaseia was the only Pontic city granted permission, for a brief period, to strike its own silver and gold coins as a reward for its services to the king. However, no coin supporting this claim has been shown in published catalogues. An early Pegasus tetradrachm of about 115-114 BC held in collections is stated to have been struck at Amaseia or Sinope, but which of the two mints produced it is uncertain.

The circulation of the city bronzes can be traced well thanks to the hoards. Most of the 1st-century BC hoards found in the central Black Sea region consist solely of Pontic city coins, and their burial dates cluster around 85, 75 and 65 BC; the first two coincide with the Mithridatic wars, and the third with Roman intervention in the region and Pompey's reorganisation. The Kabadüz hoard from Ordu contained 2,003 bronze coins; another hoard, recorded as "Asia Minor North", held 5,000 bronzes from Amisos alone. In the hoards found at Merzifon and at Yıldızeli in the province of Sivas, one coin each from the Bosporan cities of Phanagoria and Pantikapaion came to light alongside the Pontic coins, and no money of any other kingdom or city was found. In the hoard of 401 bronzes handed over to the Çorum Museum in 2010 and recorded as found in the Toybelen neighbourhood of Samsun, 318 of the coins came from Amisos; the remainder included products of the mints of Amaseia, Gaziura, Cabeira, Chabakta and Comana, together with Amastris, Sinope and Dia in Bithynia. All these finds show that the largest output was at Amisos and that Amaseia was a regular part of this common monetary system. The Greek, Roman and Byzantine coins in the Amasya Museum were published by Stanley Ireland in a separate catalogue in 2000.

The silver coins of Mithridates VI, for their part, circulated far beyond the kingdom. Hoards containing the king's tetradrachms and staters have been found at Piraeus, at the Dipylon in Athens, at Poggio Picenze in Italy, on Crete, near Çeşme, on Delos, at Thessaloniki, in Bulgaria, in Azerbaijan and in Armenia. In most of them the tetradrachms of Mithridates appear together with Athenian "New Style" tetradrachms and coins of the Lysimachus type, and they were buried in the years of unrest caused by the Mithridatic army. According to Erciyas, these hoards are also good indications of the movements of Mithridates' soldiers in northern Greece, the islands and Athens.

The End of the Kingdom and the Coins of the Polemonid Dynasty

With the death of Mithridates VI in 63 BC the independent existence of the Pontic kingdom came to an end, and so did the king's coinage. After Pompey's settlement part of the kingdom's territory was joined to a Roman province, while the interior was left for a time to rulers dependent on Rome. Polemon I, who was made king of Pontus around 36 BC and from 17 BC also ruled the Bosporus, issued silver drachms with the epithet Eusebes, "the pious"; on the reverse of these coins old Pontic symbols such as Pegasus and the star reappear. Polemon's widow, Queen Pythodoris, during her reign from 8 BC to AD 22-23, struck drachms bearing the heads of Augustus and Tiberius, with types such as the cornucopia, the capricorn, the scales and the star. Their daughter Antonia Tryphaena and her son Polemon II also issued portrait drachms, both jointly and separately. On the drachms of Polemon II, king of Pontus from AD 38 to 64/65, the heads of the emperors Claudius and Nero as well as those of Agrippina and Britannicus appear; these coins are dated by his own era, which began in the autumn of AD 38. After Polemon II, Pontus Polemoniacus too was incorporated into the Roman provincial system, and royal coinage in the region came to a complete end. The bronze city coins that Amaseia subsequently struck in its own name are described, as a subject of the Roman period, in a separate article.

Chronology

5th century BC: Sinope strikes silver drachms; it is the only known mint in the region.

4th century BC: Amisos strikes silver drachms under the name Peiraieus.

281 BC: The year Mithridates I Ktistes defeated Diodorus, general of Seleucus; Erciyas thinks the first gold stater may have been struck in this period.

c. 230-220 BC: The Kirazlı hoard near Amasya is buried; among its 822 silver coins there is no Pontic coin.

c. 220 BC: Mithridates III's unsuccessful attempt on Sinope; according to Callataÿ the gold staters of the Athena and Nike type are struck at Amisos at this time.

c. 220-200 BC: Portrait tetradrachms of Mithridates III; the star and crescent emblem appears for the first time.

c. 185-170 BC: The Amasya hoard is buried; it contains tetradrachms of Pharnaces.

183 BC: Pharnaces I takes Sinope, and the capital moves from Amaseia to Sinope.

c. 162 and 141 BC: Tetradrachms of Pharnaces are recorded in the temple inventories of Delos.

c. 169-150 BC: Coins of Mithridates IV with the Perseus type and with the joint portrait with Laodice.

c. 150-120 BC: Mithridates V Euergetes; the Apollo-type tetradrachm known from a single example.

120s BC: The striking of city bronzes of the Mithridates VI period begins at Amisos, Amaseia, Cabeira and Sinope.

119-100 BC: Small bronzes of the comet type.

96/95 BC: Dating by year and month begins on the royal silver.

93-89 BC: Heavy minting before the First Mithridatic War.

89/88 BC: Conquest of western Anatolia; according to Price, the stag begins to replace Pegasus.

88-86 BC: Gold staters in the name of Lysimachus at Callatis, Istros, Tomis and Byzantium; dated staters at Pergamon.

76-74 BC: Second period of heavy minting; a dated tetradrachm struck at Pergamon in July 75 BC.

c. 85, 75 and 65 BC: Burial periods of the hoards of city bronzes in Pontus.

63 BC: Death of Mithridates VI; Pontic royal coinage comes to an end.

c. 36 BC-AD 64/65: Drachms of Polemon I, Pythodoris, Antonia Tryphaena and Polemon II.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Martin J. Price, "Mithradates VI Eupator, Dionysus, and the Coinages of the Black Sea", Numismatic Chronicle 1968.
  • Kamil Doğancı, Recep Altın, "Strabon'a Göre Antikçağda Amaseia ve Çevresi", Karadeniz Araştırmaları XV/58 (2018), pp. 1-25.

Academic studies

  • François de Callataÿ, "The First Royal Coinages of Pontos (from Mithridates III to Mithridates V)", in J. M. Højte (ed.), Mithridates VI and the Pontic Kingdom, Black Sea Studies 9, Aarhus 2009, pp. 63-94.
  • Deniz Burcu Erciyas, Studies in the Archaeology of Hellenistic Pontus: The Settlements, Monuments, and Coinage of Mithradates VI and His Predecessors, doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2001.
  • Toybelen Definesi (Samsun, Türkiye): Ön Değerlendirme, Anatolian Archaeology (DergiPark).
  • Şengül Dilek Ful, "Epigrafik, Nümizmatik ve Arkeolojik Veriler Işığında Tokat'ta Zeus Kültü", Karadeniz İncelemeleri Dergisi 38 (2025), pp. 67-90.

Books

  • Brian C. McGing, The Foreign Policy of Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus, Leiden 1986.

Other sources

  • François de Callataÿ, L'histoire des guerres mithridatiques vue par les monnaies, Louvain-la-Neuve 1997.
  • Barclay V. Head, Historia Numorum, 2nd edition, Oxford 1911, sections "Pontus" and "Kings of Pontus".
  • Otto Mørkholm, Early Hellenistic Coinage from the Accession of Alexander to the Peace of Apamea (336-188 B.C.), Cambridge 1991.
  • Friedrich Imhoof-Blumer, "Die Kupferprägung des mithradatischen Reiches und andere Münzen des Pontos und Paphlagoniens", Numismatische Zeitschrift 45 (1912), pp. 169-192.
  • W. H. Waddington, E. Babelon, Th. Reinach, Recueil général des monnaies grecques d'Asie Mineure, I, Paris 1904.
  • Georges Le Rider, Nezahat Olçay, Le trésor de Kirazlı (près d'Amasya), 1987.
  • Stanley Ireland, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Coins in the Museum at Amasya (Ancient Amaseia), Turkey, London 2000.
  • Lawrence University, Bearers of Meaning catalogue, no. 46: tetradrachm of Mithradates III of Pontos.
  • Art Institute of Chicago, tetradrachm of Mithridates VI (inventory 1922.4928).
  • Tyler Rossi, "The Ancient Coins of Mithridates", CoinWeek, 2022.
  • WildWinds, catalogue of coins of the Kings of Pontos, Mithradates VI. wildwinds.com
  • Pontic coinage; Mithridates VI Eupator (Wikipedia, auxiliary source). en.wikipedia.org

Online sources