1 Rial - Qaboos 29th National Day, Silver

Issued to mark the 29th anniversary of Sultan Qaboos bin Said's accession following the palace coup of July 23, 1970, in which he deposed his own father, Said bin Taimur, with British backing. The elder sultan had ruled Oman in near-total isolation, banning sunglasses, radios, and Western medicine — leaving the country with fewer than ten kilometers of paved road at the time of his removal. Qaboos's transformation of Omani infrastructure and public life in the three decades that followed was the explicit political backdrop against which these annual National Day commemoratives were produced.