500 Tenge Fragment of a Diadem

Part of Kazakhstan's "Golden Man" series, this coin references the Saka warrior burial discovered in 1969 at Issyk, near Almaty, where excavators uncovered over four thousand gold artifacts alongside skeletal remains estimated to date to the 5th–4th century BC. The diadem fragment in question belongs to that assemblage — one of the defining archaeological finds of Soviet-era Central Asia, and the basis for Kazakhstan's modern national identity claims to pre-Turkic steppe antiquity.

The gilding applied over .925 silver was a deliberate technical choice to approximate the original gold artifacts without the cost of a full gold issue.