Major mints: Acanthus, Aegae, Amphipolis, Chalcidice, Lete, Neapolis, Pella, Philippi, Pydna, Thessalonica, and an extensive series of royal issues.

In the north of Greece, this semi-barbarous land was long regarded as a sort of backwater, Greece, but just barely. The earliest mythological reference, in Hesiod, attributes the origin of this people to one Macedon, son of Zeus. The royal house claimed descent from the Argives.

In the seventh century a petty king named Perdiccas captured Macedonia proper from the miscellaneous inhabitants. The kingdom remained a minor power up to the middle of the fourth century, when Philip II (359-336 BC) took advantage of the turmoil in Greece to make himself master of the country. He defeated the Greek alliance army at Chaeronea in 338 BC, controlling Greece in a thinly veiled tyranny. When he fell to an assassin his son Alexander III, the Great (336-323 BC), went on to conquer the known world to the banks of the Indus.

His death saw his empire collapse into warring factions. Macedon itself was stabilized as a kingdom in roughly its former extent, but meanwhile a new power, Rome, had arisen in Italy. The Macedonians suffered crushing defeat near the Dogs Heads mountains (Cynoscephalae) under Philip V in 197; his son Perseus at Pydna in 168 lost his kingdom when the Romans demonstrated that the earlier battle was no fluke.

Subsequently the Romans divided up the kingdom into four republics, then after a revolt reorganized it as a province, then later absorbed it, with Greece, into the province of Achaea.

The Macedonian kingdom issued a well-known series of royal coins, in particular the issues of Philip II, whose issues commemorate his Olympic victory in the horse-race; and those of his son Alexander. In addition many cities and some tribes issued coinage before absorption into the kingdom. Acanthus issued coins of the more typically Asian type of a lion pouncing on a bull. Mende issued coins with the design of Selinus reclining on the back of a jackass, and a vine in an incuse square. The Chalkidian League, formed in opposition to Athenian designs on the area, had as types the head of Apollo and his lyre. Some cities issued coins mainly in the archaic period; Lete, for example, issued coins with type of a satyr courting a nymph; Neaopolis issued a famous type of a facing Gorgons head, and various uncertain mints produced charming coins, such as that with two girls holding an amphora.

Tribal coins include mainly militaristic designs. The Derrones issued large silver coins (dodekadrachms) with an ox- or bull-cart the Bisalti produced coins of a familiar type of a horse walking, accompanied by a naked warrior with two spears. The same type was used on the earliest coins of Alexander I.

The Romans issued a vast coinage in Macedonia. Some of the earlier issues were tetradrachms and bronzes in the name of various governors; later issues were typical Roman provincial bronzes.