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.
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.