Historians recognize a country's currency as a source shedding light on nation-building projects. Issues of national currency are means by which states inculcate in audiences--domestic and foreign--specific ideas about the nature of their rule and the land and citizens within their borders. Jordan is no exception; the Hashemites have heavily utilized portraits of monarchs with ancient and modern landmarks to represent Jordan pictorially. Although Jordan's nation-building project after independence toed a fraught line in the face of leftist Arab nationalism, it had reason to undertake self-promotion by means of antiquities. Unlike the case of its neighbors, no ancient relics falling within its first borders had been co-opted into an identity framework by a colonial or mandatory regime. Between 1927 and 1952 Jordan undertook a massive program, designed by the British, of institutionalizing its land. In State, Land and Society in Jordan (2000), Michael Fischbach demonstrates that this land program proved instrumental in building an effective bureaucracy by which citizens interacted with the state, securing their loyalty to the state and imparting the reality of a Jordanian nation upon them. Jordan simultaneously organized a currency board, a central bank and a process for producing currency. The landscape into which Jordan's citizens were organized was often the subject chosen for its minted currency. Jordan's elastic borders and fluctuating populations have created special problems for efforts to offer the mind's eye a definitive conception of the nation. The antiquity of Jordan's landscape has thus been consistently juxtaposed with its modernity and portraits of kings, demonstrating continuity, change and legitimacy, all for the good of the nation. This focus on Jordanian currency was for a dissertation--now a manuscript in progress--exploring the role antiquities have played in cultivating unified or competing identities among Jordanians throughout the country's history. The paper I propose for MESA's 2010 conference argues that the choice of iconography for Jordanian currency has been calculated with the domestic audience in mind. Such choices have been made based on Jordan's needs within its political or socioeconomic context at any given time. These conclusions are based on primary and secondary literature regarding Jordan's banking system and the minting of its currency, interviews with persons having first-hand knowledge of the design of Jordan's currency and examination of the currency itself for careful consideration of its elements within the context of events in Jordan's history.