The Egyptian pound
Currency · EGP · E£ · 1 country
Egypt has issued its own pound since a decree of 1834 made the minting of gold and silver coin a government monopoly, and the first pound coins went into circulation in 1836. The Central Bank of Egypt has held the right to issue the notes since 1960 and prints them at home. Outside Egypt, the Gaza Strip uses the pound unofficially.
The sign
E£ sets the letter E in front of the pound sign. Writers also use £E and LE, the form the Central Bank of Egypt prints in its own English texts. Arabic writes ج.م., the initials of جنيه مصرى, Egyptian pound. Piastres are written PT.
- ISO code
- EGP
- ISO number
- 818
- Subunit
- piastre, 1/100
An amount, written out
E£1,234.50
- E£1,234.50English
- ١٬٢٣٤٫٥٠ E£ArabicEgypt
The sign in code
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, UTF-8
- HTML
E£E£- CSS
content: "E\00A3";- JavaScript
"E\u00A3"- UTF-8
0x45 0xC2 0xA3- UTF-16
0x0045 0x00A3- UTF-32
0x00000045 0x000000A3
Where the Egyptian pound is the official currency
Egypt is the member. Beyond it, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan paid in Egyptian pounds from 1899 to 1956, and the Gaza Strip uses them unofficially today.
About the Egyptian pound
Who prints and issues the Egyptian pound
Law No. 250 of 19 July 1960, amended that November by Law No. 377, created the Central Bank of Egypt and gave it the right to issue banknotes. The privilege had belonged to the National Bank of Egypt, which the government chartered in 1898 for fifty years and which put out its first notes on 3 April 1899.
Egyptian notes used to be printed abroad. The central bank built a printing house beside the Giza pyramids, shaped like a sphinx, and began producing notes there in December 1967. Its staff trained on offset and intaglio. In 1993 the house took a note from design to finishing on its own for the first time, the 50-pound note. It now works from two branches, in Giza and in the New Administrative Capital, and also prints passports, cheques and university certificates.
How the gold pound gave way to paper
Before 1834 Egypt had no fixed monetary unit, and only a few of the gold and silver coins in use were struck locally. The decree of that year brought in gold and silver together. Most of Egypt's trading partners, the United Kingdom above all, went over to gold. Egypt followed. Its monetary reform law of 1885 made the gold Egyptian pound the single currency and abandoned silver, with the pound set at 7.4375 grams of fine gold.
The mint could not strike enough of them. So the government let foreign gold coins circulate at fixed legal rates, and the British sovereign became the coin people paid with. A decree of 2 August 1914 made the notes legal tender and suspended their conversion into gold, and from then on the paper pound was the base of the system. Egypt kept a sterling peg of 97.5 piastres to the pound sterling until the early 1960s, then switched to a peg against the US dollar.
Where the pound circulated beyond Egypt
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan used the Egyptian pound from 1899 to 1956. So did Cyrenaica, from 1942 to 1951. Mandatory Palestine used it from 1918 until 1927, when the Palestine pound took over.
Wikipedia, citing a 2021 study of macroeconomic policy in fragile states, names the Gaza Strip as an unofficial user today. The record for Palestine lists the Israeli new shekel, the Jordanian dinar and the US dollar, and not the pound.
What happened to the piastre and the millieme
A pound divides into 100 piastres, written PT for piastre tarif. In Arabic it is the qirsh. After 1885 the piastre was split into tenths, and in 1916 those tenths were renamed milliemes, a thousand to the pound. Both have since lost legal tender status. The mint's lowest coin is 25 piastres, a quarter of a pound.
Which notes and coins circulate
The central bank added 20-pound notes in 1976, 100 in 1978, 50 in 1993 and 200 in 2007. Every note is bilingual: Arabic text and Eastern Arabic numerals on the front, English and Western numerals on the back. Fronts usually show an Islamic building and backs an Ancient Egyptian temple, statue or inscription.
Coins of 50 piastres and one pound dated 2005 arrived on 1 June 2006, carrying Cleopatra VII and the mask of Tutankhamun, and the pound coin is bimetallic. The paper pound note then went out of circulation in 2010, only for the National Bank of Egypt to bring it back in June 2016 during a shortage of small change. The bank later moved the 10 and 20-pound notes to polymer and kept the paper versions as legal tender. In August 2021 critics online read the rainbow hologram on the new notes as a message of support for LGBT rights, and the central bank answered that it was a security feature against counterfeiting.
Common questions
Questions about the Egyptian pound
Is the Egyptian pound used in Gaza?
Yes, unofficially. Wikipedia, drawing on a 2021 study of fragile states from Oxford University Press, names the Gaza Strip as an unofficial user of the Egyptian pound. The use is informal: the record for Palestine lists the Israeli new shekel, the Jordanian dinar and the US dollar, not the pound. The pound has crossed that border before: Mandatory Palestine used it from 1918 until the Palestine pound arrived in 1927.
Why is the Egyptian pound called a guinea in Arabic?
The Arabic name, junayh, comes from the English guinea. The gold unit brought in by the reform of 1885 was known as the gineih, and its weight was fixed by the gold content of the British sovereign, which by then was the coin Egyptians paid with.
What does LE mean on an Egyptian price tag?
LE is one of the abbreviations for the Egyptian pound, alongside E£ and £E. The Central Bank of Egypt uses it in its English publications, writing the 50-pound note as 50 LE. In Arabic the pound is abbreviated ج.م., and prices in piastres carry PT, short for piastre tarif.
When did Egypt start printing its own banknotes?
In December 1967, at a printing house the Central Bank of Egypt built beside the Giza pyramids. Until then Egyptian notes were printed abroad. For the first years the house made its plates from moulds produced overseas; from 1983 it made the moulds itself, and in 1993 it designed and printed a complete note, the 50-pound denomination, without outside help. The first notes of all, issued by the National Bank of Egypt, date from 3 April 1899. The central bank took over the right to issue them in 1960.