Iraq P-81 10 Dinars 1992 UNC—Saddam Hussein—Teal—Small—Babylon—Winged Bull

Printed in the shadow of the Gulf War, this note put Saddam Hussein’s face next to the most famous gate in the ancient world — a deliberate claim of inheritance from Babylon’s greatest kings.

Banknote Characteristics

• Varieties:
  • With UV fluorescent numeral “10” at left and right on front
  • Without UV fluorescent numeral
• Color: Purplish black, blue-green and multicolor
• Front: Portrait of Saddam Hussein at right; Ishtar Gate of Babylon at center
• Back: Lamassu (winged Assyrian bull with human head); Palace of Sargon II, Khorsabad
• Watermark: Falcon’s head
• Composition: Paper
• Size: 170 × 80 mm (6.69 × 3.15 in)
• Issuing entity: Central Bank of Iraq (البنك المركزي العراقي)
• Series: Gulf War Emergency Issue
• Demonetized: Yes
• References: P-81
• Currency: Iraqi dinar (1931–date)
• Country: Iraq — Republic (1958–date)

About Iraq

• Capital: Baghdad (city ~7.5 million; metro ~8.5 million)
• Population: ~42 million (UN 2023) — similar to Algeria or California
• Area: 438,317 km² (169,235 mi²) — similar to Sweden or California plus Nevada
• GDP per capita at PPP: ~$16,000 USD (IMF 2024) — ranks ~110th out of 193 globally
• Main exports: Crude oil (~99% of export revenue), natural gas
• Borders: Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria
• Official languages: Arabic, Kurdish
• Spoken languages: Mesopotamian Arabic (majority); Sorani Kurdish (~15–20%, north); Neo-Aramaic (~200,000); Iraqi Turkmen (~3%, north — spoken vernacular; standard Turkish used as literary and media language)
• Sovereignty:
  • Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria (c. 3500–539 BC) — the cradle of civilization
  • Persian, Greek/Seleucid, and Parthian rule (539 BC–224 AD)
  • Sasanian Persian Empire (224–637 AD)
  • Arab-Islamic conquest; Abbasid Caliphate with Baghdad as capital (750–1258)
  • Mongol conquest (1258); subsequent Ilkhanate and Timurid rule
  • Ottoman Empire (1534–1918)
  • British Mandate (1920–1932)
  • Kingdom of Iraq (1932–1958)
  • Republic (1958–date), including Ba’athist rule (1968–2003) and Saddam Hussein’s presidency (1979–2003)

Iraq Unfiltered

• Iraq is home to the oldest writing system on earth — cuneiform, invented by the Sumerians around 3200 BC, was used for over 3,000 years across dozens of languages and empires.
• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World — may never have existed; no Babylonian text mentions them, and some scholars believe they were actually in Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq.
• The Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 destroyed the largest library in the world at the time — the House of Wisdom — and reportedly turned the Tigris black with ink from its books.
• Iraq holds the world’s fifth-largest proven oil reserves, yet ranks only ~110th globally in GDP per capita — a gap that tells the story of the 20th century in one number.

Saddam beside the gate that outlasted every empire

The Ishtar Gate was built by Nebuchadnezzar II around 575 BC as the eighth gate of Babylon — glazed in brilliant blue lapis lazuli tile, decorated with alternating rows of sirrush (dragon-like creatures sacred to the god Marduk) and aurochs (wild bulls sacred to Adad). It was the most spectacular entrance to the most powerful city on earth. The original was dismantled by German archaeologists in the early 20th century and reassembled in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, where it still stands. What remains in Iraq is a reconstruction.

Saddam Hussein placed himself next to it deliberately. He saw himself as the heir to Nebuchadnezzar — he had his name stamped on the bricks of his own Babylon reconstruction, just as Nebuchadnezzar had done 2,500 years earlier. The note is propaganda as much as currency.

The beast on the back: Lamassu, guardian of kings

The creature on the reverse is a Lamassu — a winged bull with a human head, the protective deity of Assyrian palaces and city gates. It has five legs, so it appears to stand still when viewed from the front and to stride forward when viewed from the side. This one stood at the entrance to the Palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad, built around 713 BC. Sargon II was one of the greatest Assyrian kings — conqueror of Samaria, deporter of the northern Israelite tribes, builder of a city so vast it was abandoned immediately after his death.

Babylon, the Bible, and the Jews

Yes — all of it. Babylon appears more than 250 times in the Bible. Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BC and deported the Jewish population to Babylon — the Babylonian Captivity, one of the defining events of Jewish history. The exiles sat by the rivers of Babylon and wept, as Psalm 137 records. They stayed for roughly 70 years until Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon in 539 BC and allowed them to return.

The Tower of Babel is almost certainly based on the Etemenanki — a massive ziggurat in Babylon dedicated to Marduk, possibly over 90 meters tall. Hebrew exiles would have seen it under construction or in use and carried the memory home. The word “Babel” is simply the Hebrew form of “Babylon.”

Sargon II on the back of this note deported the ten northern tribes of Israel after conquering Samaria in 722 BC — the origin of the legend of the Ten Lost Tribes. Two monuments on one banknote, both directly connected to the most consequential events in biblical history.

An emergency note from the year the world turned against him

This note was issued in 1992 — the year after the Gulf War, after the liberation of Kuwait, after the Highway of Death, after UN sanctions had begun to strangle the Iraqi economy. It is called an “emergency issue” because it was printed quickly, with simplified security features, to meet demand as the economy destabilized. Saddam’s face on the front, Babylon’s glory on the back — a regime asserting permanence while the walls closed in.

Own this document of empire, exile, and collapse

Three thousand years of civilization on one note. The gate that held the Jews captive. The bull that guarded Assyrian kings. The face of a dictator who compared himself to Nebuchadnezzar and ended in a spider hole.

Babylon is a ruin. The Lamassu stands in Berlin. The note is in your hands.