Æ34 - Trajan L ΙΒ

Year 12 of Trajan's reign in Egypt — the dating system used by Alexandria's mint tied each issue to the regnal year rather than the Roman consular calendar, making Egyptian bronzes among the most precisely datable provincial coins in the empire. The Alexandria mint was the sole legal producer of coinage for Egypt, a monopoly enforced since the Ptolemaic period and maintained deliberately by Rome to control currency exchange at the border: foreign coins had to be exchanged for Alexandrian issues upon entry, generating revenue and keeping Roman silver out of local circulation.