AR23 - Hadrian L Δ

Year four of Hadrian's reign — the Δ in the date — fell during his early imperial consolidation, when he had just abandoned Trajan's Mesopotamian conquests and withdrawn to the Euphrates frontier. Alexandria's mint operated under Roman prefectural oversight but maintained its own dating system tied to the Egyptian regnal year, a bureaucratic holdover from Ptolemaic practice that Rome never bothered to dismantle. The billon tetradrachm series from this period varies considerably in actual silver content, with year-four pieces generally showing better fineness than later issues as the progressive debasement had not yet taken firm hold.