10 Līrāt / Livres FAO, Essai

Lebanon's FAO coinage program in the early 1980s was already a formality. The country was in the third year of sustained Israeli and Syrian military presence, Beirut was fracturing along sectarian lines, and the Lebanese pound was beginning the long collapse that would eventually render ordinary commerce nearly impossible. An essai struck for international FAO catalog purposes against that backdrop was never going to see general circulation — it existed as an administrative artifact of an institution trying to project normalcy through numismatic participation.

Essais of this type were produced in strictly limited quantities for presentation and archival use, distributed primarily to government ministries and foreign central banks.