Tetradrachm - Ptolemy II Philadelphos Joppa

Ptolemy II ruled for nearly four decades and oversaw the expansion of the Alexandrian library, but his coinage policy may have been equally consequential. He closed Egypt to foreign silver, mandating that all incoming coin be melted and restruck to Ptolemaic standard — a monetary quarantine that makes mint attribution genuinely meaningful. Joppa, a Phoenician coastal city under Ptolemaic control through much of the third century BC, operated as one of several Syrian-Palestinian branch mints supplying currency to Levantine trade routes.

The Lorber 1.1 sequence places this piece among the earliest systematically catalogued Joppa output.