The French post offices in Egypt were a system of post office

Post office

A post office is a facility forming part of a postal system for the posting, receipt, sorting, handling, transmission or delivery of mail.Post offices offer mail-related services such as post office boxes, postage and packaging supplies...

s maintained by France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 in Egypt

Egypt

Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

 during the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. They were primarily intended to facilitate commercial and trading interests that needed to communicate between France and points east.

The post offices were located at Alexandria

Alexandria

Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...

 and Port Said

Port Said

Port Said is a city that lies in north east Egypt extending about 30 km along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, north of the Suez Canal, with an approximate population of 603,787...

.

France issued postage stamp

Postage stamp

A postage stamp is a small piece of paper that is purchased and displayed on an item of mail as evidence of payment of postage. Typically, stamps are made from special paper, with a national designation and denomination on the face, and a gum adhesive on the reverse side...

s for each of these two, generally at the same time and with the same general charactistics, with the one overprinted or inscribed "ALEXANDRIE" and the other "PORT-SAID".

The first issue appeared in 1899; it consisted of the post office name (as described above) overprinted on the current "Type Sage" stamps, a total of 15 values ranging from one centime

Centime

Centime is French for "cent", and is used in English as the name of the fraction currency in several Francophone countries ....

 to five franc

Franc

The franc is the name of several currency units, most notably the Swiss franc, still a major world currency today due to the prominence of Swiss financial institutions and the former currency of France, the French franc until the Euro was adopted in 1999...

s. A shortage of the 25c values at Port Said necessitated surcharge

Overprint

An overprint is an additional layer of text or graphics added to the face of a postage stamp or banknote after it has been printed. Post offices most often use overprints for internal administrative purposes such as accounting but they are also employed in public mail...

s on the 10c value, reading "PORT SAID / VINGT / CINQ". A few of these were additional overprinted with "25" in red ink.

The first stamps inscribed for these post offices were the French designs of 1900 modified to include the post offices' names. The 15 values appeared in 1902 and 1903.

In 1921 the stamps were surcharged in Egyptian currency, at the rate of about 2.5 centimes per milieme. Several forms of the surcharge exist. In Alexandria, local surcharges read "4 Mill." etc, while in Port Said they read "4 / Milliemes", with the number in a sans-serif

Sans-serif

In typography, a sans-serif, sans serif or san serif typeface is one that does not have the small projecting features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the French word sans, meaning "without"....

 typeface. Soon after Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

-produced surcharges arrived in both offices; they read "4 / MILLIEMES" etc. A new round of surcharges in 1925 added black bars to obscure the French currency values.

In 1927 and 1928 the old designs were reprinted but with millieme values substituted, ranging from 3 m to 250 m.

Sources

• Stanley Gibbons Ltd: various catalogues
• Encyclopaedia of Postal History
• Rossiter, Stuart
  Stuart Rossiter
  Percival "Stuart" Bryce Rossiter was a renowned British philatelist and postal historian who wrote extensively about British postal history and postage stamps of British colonies in Africa and was actively involved in numerous philatelic institutions...
  
  & John Flower. The Stamp Atlas. London: Macdonald, 1986. ISBN 0356108627