5 Milliemes IWY, Mule

The International Women's Year coinage of 1975 generated one of the more embarrassing episodes in modern Egyptian minting history. This piece — catalogued as a mule — pairs dies that were not intended to be used together, a production error that almost certainly originated in the retooling confusion surrounding the IWY commemorative programme. Egypt's mint at the time was managing multiple simultaneous issues, and die mismatches of this kind, while rarely acknowledged officially, surface with enough consistency in Egyptian coinage of the period to suggest systemic quality control problems rather than isolated accidents.