10 Riyals

The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency was only established in 1952, and this 1954 note belongs to the agency's first series of banknotes — a significant shift for a country whose religious conservatives had long opposed paper currency as potentially usurious. The notes required careful political management before they could enter circulation at all.

Thomas De La Rue's involvement here is unsurprising given their dominance in Gulf state printing contracts during the 1950s. Watermark security was the primary anti-counterfeiting measure, reflecting both the technology of the period and the relatively limited infrastructure for detecting more sophisticated features in Saudi commerce at the time.