Æ18 - Hadrian L Β

This piece dates to Hadrian's first regnal year in Egypt — L Β marking year two of his reign by the Egyptian calendar, which began in late summer 117 AD, just months after Trajan died in Cilicia and Hadrian's accession was announced by the Praetorian prefect Attianus. Alexandria's mint was extraordinarily active in this transition period, issuing a dense sequence of dated bronzes that allow historians to track the new emperor's administrative rollout province by province. Egyptian coinage operated entirely outside the Roman imperial system, denominated and distributed locally, making Alexandrian bronzes functionally invisible to most of the empire.