40 Para - Selim III 1 Qirsh

Selim III's accession in 1789 coincided almost exactly with the outbreak of the French Revolution, and his reign would prove equally turbulent. The Egyptian mint at Misr struck this billon qirsh under the reformed monetary system Selim attempted to impose across Ottoman provincial coinage — an effort to standardize a currency system that had fragmented badly across the empire's far-flung mints. Egypt's issues were notoriously inconsistent in silver content even within a single reign, and billon rather than fine silver reflects the fiscal pressures already straining the treasury before Napoleon's 1798 invasion made the situation catastrophic.