5 Pounds Tutankhamen and wife

Egypt's commemorative silver program in the 1990s was tied closely to the sustained international fascination following Howard Carter's 1922 discovery of KV62 — a tomb so intact that its contents required a decade to fully catalog and remove. This piece was issued roughly seventy years after that discovery, at a moment when Egyptological tourism was a principal driver of foreign currency revenue for the Mubarak government.

The specific scene depicted here derives from a gilded wooden shrine found within the tomb, one of the most reproduced images in modern Egyptology.