Summary Analysed coins Analysis

Summary

Pre-Hellenistic silver staters minted at Anemourion, Aphrodisias, Holmoi, Kelenderis, Nagidos and the Pseudo-Kelenderis mints can be divided into two major groups based on their weight. Assuming that these mints used the same weight standard during the same time periods, and assuming that the weight standard was not increased over time, these groups represent two phases in the development of the weight standard in Cilicia Trachea. These two weight standards differ in mean and median weight by approximately 0.7 g, representing a decrease of about 6.5% in the second phase.

The Holmoi, Kelenderis, Nagidos, and Pseudo-Kelenderis mints produced staters during both phases. In contrast, Anemourion and Aphrodisias only began minting staters in the second phase, adhering exclusively to the reduced weight standard. However, it is important to note that Anemourion is represented by only two coins, and the Aphrodisias coinage remains uncertain.

Analysed coins

Coin catalogue sections:	Anemourion, Aphrodisias, Holmoi, Kelenderis, Nagidos, Pseudo-Kelenderis Mints
Coin corpus datasets:	Anemourion, Aphrodisias, Staters, Holmoi, Group 1, Holmoi, Group 2, Kelenderis, Staters – Group 1, Kelenderis, Staters – Group 2, Kelenderis, Staters – Group 3, Nagidos, Staters – Group 1, Nagidos, Staters – Group 2, Nagidos, Staters – Group 3, Pseudo-Kelenderis Mints

The numbers of analysed coins are given in Table 1. Coins whose weight is unknown or unreliable, or that are excessively corroded or damaged, are excluded from the analysis.

Corpus	Number of coins as of 2 November 2025
	Total	Excluded	Analysed
Anemourion	2		2
Aphrodisias, Staters	4		4
Holmoi, Group 1, staters	9		9
Holmoi, Group 2, staters	9	1	8
Kelenderis, Staters – Group 1	14	1	13
Kelenderis, Staters – Group 2	249	1	248
Kelenderis, Staters – Group 3	272	4	268
Nagidos, Staters – Group 1	143	1	142
Nagidos, Staters – Group 2	249	1	248
Nagidos, Staters – Group 3	202	7	195
Pseudo-Kelenderis mints	20	2	18

Table 1: Numbers of analysed coins

Analysis

Staters minted at Anemourion and Aphrodisias (the Aphrodisias coinage is somewhat uncertain, see the catalogue section devoted to Aphrodisias) form homogeneous sets. On the other hand, staters minted by the Holmoi, Kelenderis, Nagidos and Pseudo-Kelenderis mints can be divided into the following groups (see the relevant catalogue sections and, for Kelenderis and Nagidos, also their weight analyses):

Holmoi:	Group 1:	Type 1;
	Group 2:	Type 2.
Kelenderis:	Group 1:	Types 1.1–3;
	Group 2:	Types 2.1–12;
	Group 3A:	Types 3.1–3 and 3.7–12;
	Group 3B:	Types 3.13–14;
	Group 3C:	Types 3.4–6 and 3.15–17.
Nagidos:	Group A:	Group 1 except Type 1.5e;
	Group B:	Group 2 except Type 2.8;
	Group C:	Group 3 with Types 1.5e and 2.8.
Pseudo-Kelenderis:	Group 1:	Type 1;
	Group 2:	Type 2.

Box plots1, cumulative distributions and descriptive statistics for these groups are presented in Figures 1–2 and Table 2 (Std. Dev. denotes the standard deviation and IQR the interquartile range), respectively.

Figure 1: Box plots of individual groups

Figure 2: Cumulative distributions of individual groups

Mint	Count	Mean	Median	Std. Dev.	IQR
Anemourion	2	9.66	9.66	0.21	0.29
Aphrodisias	4	9.93	9.92	0.04	0.07
Holmoi, Group 1	9	10.55	10.66	0.22	0.18
Holmoi, Group 2	8	9.95	9.97	0.21	0.34
Kelenderis, Group 1	13	10.73	10.78	0.23	0.21
Kelenderis, Group 2	248	10.72	10.74	0.10	0.14
Kelenderis, Group 3A	204	10.61	10.66	0.25	0.19
Kelenderis, Group 3B	16	10.48	10.49	0.19	0.37
Kelenderis, Group 3C	48	9.93	9.98	0.29	0.22
Nagidos, Group A	128	10.51	10.55	0.22	0.25
Nagidos, Group B	244	10.62	10.66	0.20	0.17
Nagidos, Group C	213	9.94	9.99	0.27	0.30
Pseudo-Kelenderis, Group 1	17	10.61	10.69	0.28	0.32
Pseudo-Kelenderis, Group 2	1	10.04	10.04

Table 2: Descriptive statistics of individual groups

As Figures 1–2 and Table 2 show, the staters from these mints can be divided into two large groups based on the similarity of their weights, which probably correspond to the two phases of the weight standard development in pre-Hellenistic Cilicia Trachea:

Phase 1:	Holmoi, Group 1; Kelenderis, Groups 1, 2, 3A and 3B; Nagidos, Groups A and B; Pseudo-Kelenderis, Group 1.
Phase 2:	Anemourion; Aphrodisias; Holmoi, Group 2; Kelenderis, Group 3C; Nagidos, Group C; Pseudo-Kelenderis, Group 2.

Note that Anemourion is represented by only two coins and the Pseudo-Kelenderis Group 2 by only one coin. Their inclusion in Phase 2 is therefore only preliminary. It should also be noted that these two phases represent only a basic division of the stater issues. For example, the weight analysis of the Kelenderis staters suggests that Kelenderis Groups 2 and 3B cannot be considered weight-homogeneous. However, Group 3B is represented by only 16 coins in the corpus, so it would be premature to attempt to establish multiple phases of coin production.

Box plots and descriptive statistics of these two assumed phases are presented in Figure 3 and Table 3, respectively. In Table 3, note the large negative skewness of both datasets, which is manifested in Figure 3 by high numbers of outliers below the bottom whiskers. The weight distributions of these two phases are considerably left-skewed.

Figure 3: Box plots of phases of weight standard development

Statistics	Phase 1	Phase 2
Number of coins:	879	276
Mean:	10.63	9.94
Standard deviation:	0.21	0.27
Interquartile range:	0.19	0.28
Skewness:	-2.34	-1.76
Kurtosis:	14.26	7.40
Minimum:	8.70	8.71
25th percentile:	10.57	9.85
Median:	10.67	9.98
75th percentile:	10.76	10.13
Maximum:	11.07	10.48

Table 3: Descriptive statistics of phases of weight standard development

Figure 4 presents relative frequency histograms. The bars represent the relative frequencies of observations ranging from 8.70 to 11.10 g in increments of 0.10 g and the continuous curves represent approximations of the data by the Weibull distribution2 based on maximum likelihood estimates. Cumulative distributions are shown in Figure 5.

Figure 4: Relative frequency histograms of phases of weight standard development

Figure 5: Cumulative distributions of phases of weight standard development

The one-sided Welch’s t-test3 rejects the null hypothesis that the mean weight of Phase 1 is equal to the mean weight of Phase 2 against the alternative that the mean weight in the earlier phase is higher than in the later phase (p-value less than 0.001). In addition, the two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test rejects the hypothesis that the weight distributions of these two phases are equal (p-value less than 0.001).

The distributions of coin weights in individual phases have different shapes and are asymmetric due to many factors influencing the weights of coins in the period from their minting to the present. Instead of comparing means, it is therefore statistically more appropriate to compare medians. Since the analysed data have many tied values, the percentile bootstrap method was chosen. Table 4 shows the observed sample medians and bootstrap 95% confidence intervals.4 Table 5 shows the differences in sample medians, their bootstrap 95% confidence intervals and p-values.5 These results confirm that, like the mean weights, the median weights in Phases 1 and 2 are significantly different at the 5% significance level.

	median	95% confidence interval
Phase 1	10.67	10.66	10.69
Phase 2	9.98	9.96	10.02

Table 4: Medians and their confidence intervals

	difference in medians	95% confidence interval		p-value
Phase 1 vs Phase 2	0.69	0.66	0.72	<0.001

Table 5: Differences in medians