Æ35 - Trajan L Κ

This piece belongs to Trajan's twentieth regnal year (L Κ), which ran from August 116 to August 117 — the same year Trajan died at Selinus in Cilicia while returning from his Parthian campaigns. Alexandria's mint, the only officially sanctioned bronze-producing mint in Roman Egypt, dated its issues by regnal year rather than by consulship or tribunician power, a legacy of Ptolemaic administrative habit that Rome never bothered to dismantle. The year L Κ also coincides with the suppression of the Kitos War, the catastrophic Jewish revolt that devastated the Jewish communities of Egypt, Cyprus, and Cyrenaica.