AR25 - Hadrian ΕΤ ΕΝΑΤ

This tetradrachm belongs to year nine of Hadrian's reign — ΕΤ ΕΝΑΤ being the Greek rendering of "year nine" in the Egyptian regnal calendar, which reset with each emperor's accession rather than following a fixed civic year. Hadrian was almost certainly in Egypt himself in 130 AD, not 124–125, so this coin predates his famous Nile tour by half a decade; it was struck while the emperor was still consolidating his early provincial policy from a distance.

The Alexandrian mint operated under tight prefectural control and its billon tetradrachms were not interchangeable with Roman silver — a deliberate monetary boundary Rome maintained to keep Egyptian coinage a closed currency system.