5 Dinars

The Bahrain Monetary Agency was established in 1973 specifically to replace the Bahrain Currency Board, and this note belongs to the founding series issued under that new authority — the first coinage and paper money to carry the BMA name rather than the Board's. The timing coincided with the post-1971 independence period during which Bahrain was actively building autonomous financial institutions separate from both British oversight and the broader Gulf rupee zone, which Bahrain had already exited in 1965.

Thomas De La Rue produced the series to a specification that now looks relatively sparse by later Gulf standards — a single watermark as the primary security feature, no security thread. Within a decade, the region's central banks were demanding considerably more sophisticated protection.