5 Piastres

Egypt in 1917 was under British occupation, and these government treasury notes — not central bank issues — were a direct administrative tool of that arrangement. The Egyptian Government series ran alongside British military currency in a market where confidence in paper was fragile and coin hoarding was widespread, particularly in wartime.

Barclay & Fry Ltd, a London security printer, handled the physical production. The watermark is the primary anti-counterfeiting measure — relatively modest for the period, but consistent with wartime economies in print specification.

P#158 belongs to a series that continued largely unchanged in format through the early 1920s, outlasting the political circumstances that originally prompted it.