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1 Birr Arms with plough, Green sides
| Issuer | National Bank of Ethiopia |
|---|---|
| Year | 1977 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
| Currency | Birr (1976-date) |
| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | Black and dark green intaglio printing on light brown and green underprint, with a lion's head vignette in the left-centre underprint and a map of Ethiopia at left. A young man is positioned at centre right, with longhorn cattle at right. Multi-colour guilloche patterns frame the composition, with bilingual Amharic and English legends throughout. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | Log in to see details |
| Reverse lettering | 1 አንድ፡ብር፡ ፩፡ብር (Translation: One Birr 1 Birr) |
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| Comments |
The 1977 Ethiopian 1 Birr was issued under the Derg military government, which had deposed Emperor Haile Selassie three years earlier. The regime retained the National Bank of Ethiopia as the issuing authority but stripped imperial iconography from the currency, replacing it with the socialist-inflected state symbolism introduced after the 1974 revolution. Thomas De La Rue continued printing Ethiopian notes through this political transition — a commercial continuity that sat awkwardly alongside the Derg's anti-Western rhetoric.
Pick 30 represents the lowest denomination in the 1976–1977 series, and low-denomination notes from this issue circulated heavily and wore quickly.