This article focuses on a Samarian coin issue that portrays a biga carrying people clad in Iranian apparel on the obverse and an Iranian horseman on the reverse. It was struck in the name of BDYHBL and the forerunners of the type can be traced to Sidonian coinage and Achaemenid-infl uenced minor arts. It is possible that the issuer of the coin held a military or an administrative post in the Achaemenid realm, which could explain why this and other issues bearing his name contained motifs drawn from its iconography.

The present article is a short and very preliminary report about the Hellenistic coins found during excavations conducted by the team of the Institute of Archaeology, Jagiellonian University at the agora of the ancient Nea Paphos in 2011–2019. The first archaeological research at the agora had been conducted in the late 1960s and 1970s by Kyriakos Nicolaou. The Jagiellonian University team, led by Ewdoksia Papuci-Władyka started to explore the agora area in 2011. There were at least 480 coins and coin flans found during the Polish excavations. Great part of them are minted in the Hellenistic Period. The group consists mainly of Ptolemaic coins (over 67%), but includes also Cypriot bronzes of the Zeus/Zeus type (20.5%), coins of Syro-Palestinian region (Seleucid, Hasmonean rulers – over 6%), Macedonian-Antigonid issues (3.8%), the coins from south-eastern Aegean and Asia Minor (1.6%) as well as others. Some preliminary observations concerning chronology and structure of the finds are presented.