Egyptian pound
Egyptian pound: a currency still in use.
- Dates in use
- Still in use; introduction date not established here
- Currency code
- EGP
- Ancestry branch
- See family connections
Where this money came from
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The story
The National Bank of Egypt first issued banknotes on 3 April 1899, according to the central bank's currency history. [1]
Egyptian pound → Libyan pound, Cyrenaica, 1952. [2]
The 14 November 1885 decree defines Egypt’s pound as 100 piastres and temporarily retains earlier silver at official tariff. [3]
Turning points
Account-unit observation
Egyptian medin/para accounting attested in 1524 is grouped with the later local piastre/pound identity as a qualified continuity inference. Late-eighteenth-century medin/para prices and nineteenth-century piastre subdivisions bridge the scales; unresolved regional details are not presented as a complete legal sequence. [4]
Account-unit observation
Egyptian documents used a fictive riyal of 90 paras for transactions and government accounts, expressly distinguishing it from circulating foreign coins. [5]
Account-unit observation
Browne’s Egyptian observations of 1792–1798 describe public allocations in piastres and expenses in paras, also called medines. This is dated local accounting evidence, not a currency founding date. [6]
Account-unit observation
The Egyptian piastre represented 40 paras; government accounts increasingly used piastres toward mid-century. The purse represented 20, 000 paras or 500 piastres. [7]
Account-unit observation
The 1834 reform retained a silver piastre divided into forty paras; the 1885 reform expressed the pound as one hundred piastres and changed the smaller subdivisions. Continuity of the nineteenth-century local account system is supported. [8]
Account-unit observation
The 14 November 1885 decree expressly defines the Egyptian monetary unit as the pound, divided into 100 piastres, with 10 tenths per piastre. Earlier Egyptian silver remained receivable under its official tariff during withdrawal. [9]
Sources and evidence
- Central Bank of Egypt · History Brief C546 ↗
- Deutsche Bundesbank · Metadata on the Exchange Rate Statistics, 24 September 2025; Central Bank of Libya · Exchange Rate Policy C1134 ↗
- Egypt monetary reform decree14November 1885 · Egypt monetary reform decree14November 1885, translated in US Director of Mint 1886 report C1189 ↗
- Şevket Pamuk · Şevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge 2000; William George Browne · Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria,1792–1798 (1799); Antoine Barthélémy Clot-Bey · Aperçu général sur l’Égypte, tomeII (1840); Abdel Nabi Hassan Youssef · Le Régime Monétaire de l’Égypte depuis la Première Guerre Mondiale (1960) C1291 ↗
- Kenneth M. Cuno · The Pasha’s Peasants: Land, Society, and Economy in Lower Egypt,1740–1858 (Cambridge 1992) C1864 ↗
- William George Browne · Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria,1792–1798 (1799) C1289 ↗
- Kenneth M. Cuno · The Pasha’s Peasants: Land, Society, and Economy in Lower Egypt,1740–1858 (Cambridge 1992) C1865 ↗
- Abdel Nabi Hassan Youssef · Le Régime Monétaire de l’Égypte depuis la Première Guerre Mondiale (1960); Antoine Barthélémy Clot-Bey · Aperçu général sur l’Égypte, tomeII (1840); Egypt monetary reform decree14November 1885 · Egypt monetary reform decree14November 1885, translated in US Director of Mint 1886 report C1290 ↗
- Egypt monetary reform decree14November 1885 · Egypt monetary reform decree14November 1885, translated in US Director of Mint 1886 report C1866 ↗
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“Egyptian pound.” The Family Tree of Money. © Field Technologies, Inc. Reader edition 2026-10-13; research dataset v44. https://familytreeofmoney.org/currency/FTM000375.html