1000 Dirhams - Zayed Dubai 2003

Issued to mark the centennial of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan's birth, this is among the heaviest gold commemoratives the UAE has produced for general collector release. Zayed, who ruled Abu Dhabi from 1966 and served as the UAE's founding president from 1971 until his death in 2004, was still alive when this piece was struck — one of the rare cases where a commemorative birth centennial coin predates the subject's death by less than a year.