The money of account then became 1 birr, equivalent to 16 ghersh or 32 bessa. The new silver birr maintained the same weight and fineness as the talari, but there was now a quarter-birr and a silver ghersh, the latter 1/16 the weight of the birr.
The talari, equivalent to the Maria Theresa thaler, was divided into 20 ghersh (also guerche or gersh, from the Ottoman qirsh) or 40 bessa (a small copper coin).Ī new Ethiopian coinage appeared about 1903. The Ethiopian talari became the standard unit on 9 February 1893, and 200,000 were produced at the Paris Mint in 1894 for Menelik II. The Maria Theresa thaler was officially adopted as the standard coin in 1855, although the Indian rupee and the Mexican dollar were also used in foreign trade.
The thaler was known locally as the birr (literally 'silver' in Geʽez and Amharic) or talari ( ታላሪ). In the 18th and 19th centuries, Maria Theresa thalers and blocks of salt called amole tchew ( አሞሌ) served as currency in Ethiopia. ( November 2011) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Thus, the pre-1931 currency may be referred to as the Abyssinian birr and the post-1931 currency the Ethiopian birr, although neither the country nor the currency changed beyond the name.ġ86 billion birr ($14.7 billion or €9.97 billion) were in circulation in 2008. In 1931 Haile Selassie I, the Emperor of Ethiopia, formally requested that the international community use the name Ethiopia (as it had already been known internally for at least 1,600 years ) instead of the exonym Abyssinia, and the issuing Bank of Abyssinia also became the Bank of Ethiopia. The birr ( Amharic: ብር) is the primary unit of currency in Ethiopia.
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