AR26 - Hadrian L ΔΕΚΑΤΟΥ

Year 10 of Hadrian's reign in Egypt — 125/126 AD — falls squarely within his first grand tour of the eastern provinces, during which he visited Alexandria itself. The city's mint, operating under Roman prefectural authority but retaining its Ptolemaic dating conventions, issued this tetradrachm as part of a remarkably well-documented series tied to that imperial presence. Hadrian's Egyptian visit prompted a surge of locally distinctive types, and the Alexandrian mint exploited the occasion with unusual typological variety across regnal years 11 through 14.

The billon content of Alexandrian "silver" tetradrachms had been declining for generations before Hadrian; by his reign these coins were already substantially debased relative to the Roman denarius, effectively circulating as fiduciary currency within Egypt's closed monetary system.