The Ptolemaic silver tetradrachm — 483 inventoried specimens across four mints.

The dynasty in coinage — the structural picture.

The Ptolemaic dynasty struck silver tetradrachms from the accession of Ptolemy I Soter as basileus in 305 BCE through the death of Cleopatra VII Philopator in 30 BCE. The standard weight begins at the Attic 17.20 g under Ptolemy I and is reduced to the Ptolemaic 14.20 g under Ptolemy II Philadelphus from approximately 290 BCE — a structural decision that defines the rest of the dynasty's silver coinage and is the single most important attribution diagnostic across the period. The Ptolemaic 14.20 g standard remains in force, with minor drift, until the Roman conquest.

The obverse type from Ptolemy I onward is the diademed bust of the ruling king (or, less frequently, the deified founder Ptolemy I) facing right; the reverse is the standing eagle on a thunderbolt, with mint marks and monograms in the fields. The structural simplicity of the type is deceptive: the atlas's file documents one hundred and forty-seven distinct monogram combinations, each of which signals a mint, an issuing magistrate, a workshop within the mint, or a die-engraver. Soraya's mint-mark concordance, maintained since 2016, is the atlas's standing contribution to the Ptolemaic literature.

The four mints in the file.

Mint	Period	Specimens in file	Standard weight	Diagnostic features
Alexandria	305–30 BCE	329	14.20 g (post-290)	ΠΑ monogram; Α and ΔΙ field marks
Salamis, Cyprus	294–164 BCE	71	14.18 g	ΣΑ monogram; star symbols
Tyre and Sidon	274–246 BCE	52	14.20 g	club beneath eagle; year letters
Cyrene	305–246 BCE	31	14.20 g	silphium plant in field

The Alexandria mint dominates the file because it dominated the dynasty's silver output throughout. The Cyprus mint declines after 164 BCE when the island was briefly lost to the Seleucids; the Phoenician mints close in 246 BCE with the Third Syrian War; the Cyrenaican mint closes with the political severance of Cyrenaica from the central dynasty under Ptolemy VIII. Each of these closures is documented in the atlas with the typical last-year specimens and a brief political note.

Attribution method.

Every specimen in the file is attributed against Svoronos (1904) Τὰ Νομίσματα τοῦ Κράτους τῶν Πτολεμαίων as the primary reference, with cross-references to Mørkholm (1991) Early Hellenistic Coinage for the period of Ptolemy I and II, and to the more recent BMC Greek (Ptolemies) for problematic cases. Where the three references disagree, the atlas documents the disagreement openly with each editor's argument; nineteen such cases are currently in the file. The attribution note for each specimen records the Svoronos number, the variant suffix where applicable, the agreed weight and die axis, the monogram reading, and the date range (typically to within a decade for the third and second centuries, to within five years for the late dynasty).

Forgery detection within the file.

The Ptolemaic tetradrachm is one of the most-forged ancient coins in modern circulation, in part because the type is iconic and recognisable to non-specialist buyers and in part because the relatively soft silver of the dynasty's later issues lent itself to surface-improvement techniques. The atlas's file has identified seventeen specimens initially offered for inclusion as modern manufacture — six pressed casts of the BMC Pl. XI series, four electrotype copies of museum specimens (one with the diagnostic BM-impressed reverse symbol that proves the origin), and seven die-struck modern productions of the kind associated with the Lebanese forgery workshops of the 1980s. All seventeen are catalogued in the forgery register; the diagnostic features are illustrated and described.

What the file currently does not include.

The file does not include the bronze coinage of the dynasty (a separate file under preparation), the gold octadrachms (which sit in a small fifty-three-specimen file alongside the file currently in print), or the rare half-tetradrachms and didrachms of Cyprus in the second century. These are scoped into future expansion of the file. The atlas's editorial board reviews the scope at the annual June meeting; the next scope decision is due in June 2026 and is expected to add the gold octadrachms as a dedicated sub-file.

The companion files on Roman Egypt coinage and Byzantine and Fatimid coinage continue the dynastic narrative beyond 30 BCE. The attribution methodology sets out the working process in full. The annual hoard report includes the 2024 Damanhour hoard, which contained sixty-one Ptolemaic tetradrachms now in the file.