Archaios | Egypt Alexandria Diocletian AE Tetradrachm / Eagle and Wreath | i38.7

Description

Archaios Numismatics
__________________________________________
Description:
Roman Bronze AE Tetradrachm, from Alexandria Egypt of Emperor Diocletian Dated Alexandrian Year 5 (288/289 AD).
Obverse:
Laureate, draped, and bearded bust of Emperor Right.
Reverse:
Eagle Standing Right, wings closed, holding wreath in beak; Palm Branch behind; Star to Left of Head; regnal year across fields Date L - E (RY 5))
Mint:
Alexandria, Egypt
Size:
18 mm
Weight:
7.04 g
Ref:
SNG Cop 995; Emmett 4041
Condition:
aVF
As always, Please use the Pictures as your judge as grading is subjective.
Note:
Alexandria
was an ancient city of Egypt whose history dates back to the city's founding, by Alexander the Great, in 331 BC. After its foundation, Alexandria became the seat of the Ptolemaic Kingdom, and quickly grew to be one of the greatest cities of the Hellenistic world. Only Rome, which gained control of Egypt in 30 BC, eclipsed Alexandria in size and wealth.
City of Learning - Library of Alexandria
Alexander and then the Ptolemies fostered the development of the Library of Alexandria and associated Musaeum into a renowned center for Hellenistic learning. The city and its famous library and the Musaeum fostered the development of such notable individuals as geometry and number-theorist
Euclid
; the astronomer
Hipparchus
; and
Eratosthenes
, known for calculating the Earth's circumference and for his algorithm for finding prime numbers, who became head librarian.
Strabo lists Alexandria, with Tarsus and Athens, among the learned cities of the world, observing also that Alexandria both admits foreign scholars and sends its natives abroad for further education.
Egypt under the Romans
From the time of annexation and onwards, Alexandria seemed to have regained its old prosperity, commanding, as it did, an important granary of Rome. The city passed formally under Roman jurisdiction in 80 BC, according to the will of Ptolemy Alexander but only after it had been under Roman influence for more than a hundred years. Many early emperors of Rome played parts in the early history of Alexandria -- Julius Caesar dallied with Cleopatra in Alexandria in 47 BC and was besieged in the city by Cleopatra's brother. Later Mark Antony came but was defeated in Alexandria at the Battle of Actium after which Octavian took Egypt as personal property of the emperor.
The AE / Billon Tetradrachm Coinage
In
A.D. 19
the last-named emperor
revived the Ptolemaic tetradrachm
, the issue of which had been in abeyance since Cleopatra’s death. It was struck not in debased AR, but
in the mixture of AR and Æ known as billon
and it was tariffed as
roughly equivalent to the Roman denarius.
The reform was to facilitate commercial intercourse between Egypt and the rest of the Empire. At first the billon tetradrachm weighed over 200 grains and contained a fair proportion of AR.
Debasement of the AR quickly set in and Under Commodus a percentage of AR was reduced to 10
. The next great shrinkage began under Trebonianus Gallus, and continued till in the
time of Diocletian
when a tetradrachm weighed little more than one-half of what it had originally and the proportion of
AR sank as low as 2 percent
. The earlier emperors had all struck coins in Æ, pieces of very large module being introduced by Nero and minted in enormous quantities by Trajan, Hadrian, and Pius. Under Commodus the flow was suddenly checked, while under the later emperors Æ is hardly known at all.
The tetradrachms and
the imperial Æ always have the imperial portrait on the obverse and they were doubtless minted at Alexandreia
, which was at once the seat of the government and the busiest commercial centre in the whole of the Roman world. But the
name of the city never appears except on certain alliance-coins struck at Ephesus under Gordian III
.
While the
earliest coins under Augustus were undated
(Like the Æ of Cleopatra on which it was modelled), but later a resumption of the Ptolemaic fashion of
placing upon the coins the regnal year of the monarch in whose name they were issued
. This practice continued to be observed till the very close of the series, and, since the Alexandrian year commenced on August 29, the dates and corresponding inscriptions are often useful in elucidating obscure points of Roman imperial chronology.
As a rule, the year is indicated by a numeral letter or letters preceded by the symbol L (meaning Year).
Some Excerpts From Head, Hist. Num., and Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
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