Egytian Money

Before we left, we couldn’t get any Egyptian money at our bank in Canada, but it was easy peasy to take out money from ATM machines in Egypt. We couldn’t take out a lot, no more than $400 Cdn, at a time but that’s okay because it isn’t expensive here. And if necessary, our VISA card worked fine. A few places wanted to charge a 3% VISA card usage fee but that wasn’t the norm.

We never used coins, just bills. Five pound notes, or $.25, were used to use bathrooms. This bill is smaller and dirtier than the other bills which are all about the same size. We washed our hands a lot after using the money.

We had to get used to the big apparent cost of things. Things were cheap but lots of bills were used.

All Egyptian pound banknotes are bilingual. They have an Arabic face and an English face. The Arabic side has pictures of Islamic buildings in Egypt. The English side shows ancient Egyptian motifs with engravings of figures, statues, and temples.

There are coins too but we rarely saw them. Egypt’s coin design is based largely on its ancient history. The coins include pictures of pharaohs, pyramids, and past dynasties, including Tutankhamun, Cleopatra, and the Pyramids of Giza.

Tutankhamun is featured on the highest coin, the 1 pound coin, and it’s no wonder why. The myth of King Tut is world-famous, and his tomb is one of just a few perfectly preserved Egyptian Royal Tombs.

Cleopatra also makes a fitting face for a coin, as a strong woman able to hold a country together throughout warfare in a male-dominated society.

The notes are printed with security measures. In 1930, for the first time in the history of Egyptian banknotes, a watermark with a scribe was used in issued banknotes.. Then, in 1968, they began using a metallic thread instead of watermarking.Read more