Hadrian’s Egyptian coins are remarkable both for number and variety.  In the sixth year of the reign we see a ship with spread sails, most likely in gratitude for the emperor’s safe arrival in Egypt.  In the eighth year we see the head of the favourite Antinous, who had been placed among the gods of the country.  In the eleventh year, when the emperor took up the tribunitial power at Rome for a second period of ten years, we find a series of coins, each bearing the name of the nome or district in which it was coined.  This indeed is the most remarkable year of the most remarkable reign in the whole history of coinage; we have numerous coins for every year of this reign, and, in this year, for nearly every nome in Egypt.  Some coins are strongly marked with the favourite opinion of the Gnostics as to the opposition between good and evil.

[Illustration:  109.jpg Hadrian’s Egyptian coins]

On one we have the war between the serpent of good and the serpent of evil, distinguished by their different forms and by the emblems of Isis and Serapis; on others the heads of Isis and Serapis, the principles of love and fear; while on a third these two are united into a trinity by Horus, who is standing on an eagle instead of having an eagle’s head, as represented on previous coins.

The beginning of the reign of Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138) was remarkable as being the end of the Sothic period of one thousand four hundred and sixty years; the movable new year’s day of the calendar had come round to the place in the natural year from which it first began to move in the reign of Menophres or Thutmosis III.; it had come round to the day when the dog-star rose heliacally.  If the years had been counted from the beginning of this great year, there could have been no doubt when it came to an end, as from the want of a leap year the new year’s day must have been always moving one day in four years; but no satisfactory reckoning of the years had been kept, and, as the end of the period was only known by observation, there was some little doubt about the exact year.  Indeed, among the Greek astronomers, Dositheus said the dog-star rises heliacally twenty-three days after midsummer, Meton twenty-eight days, and Euctemon thirty-one days; they thus left a doubt of thirty-two years as to when the period should end, but the statesmen placed it in the first year of the reign of Antoninus.  This end of the Sothic period Avas called the return to the phoenix, and had been looked forward to by the Egyptians for many years, and is well marked on the coins of this reign.  The coins for the first eight years teem with astronomy.  There are several with the goddess Isis in a boat, which we know, from the zodiac in the Memnonium at Thebes, was meant for the heliacal rising of the dog-star.  In the second and in the sixth year we find on the coins the remarkable word aion, the age or period, and an ibis with a glory of rays round its head, meant for the bird phoenix.  In the seventh