Among the earliest and most historically significant of all Greek coinages, this stater from Aegina belongs to the island's second great series of sea turtles, struck in the decades bracketing the Persian Wars when Aegina stood as one of the preeminent naval and commercial powers of the Aegean. The obverse depicts the emblematic sea turtle in high relief, its carapace rendered with a collar around the neck and a row of seven dots marking the vertebral scutes down the shell, a design so widely recognized throughout the Greek world that "turtles" became a byword for coined money itself, the staters of Aegina having achieved a circulation and prestige that rivaled the owls of Athens. The reverse is left in the archaic manner as a simple incuse square, here divided into five compartments by a mill-sail pattern, a punch-die technique characteristic of the earliest struck coinage before reverse types proper came into fashion.