Which country is this stamp from?

Stamps · 7 September 2026

The country is the first thing you need and often the hardest thing to read. Inscriptions come in Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, Thai, Amharic, Chinese and Japanese; some stamps carry a monarch's head and no name at all; and plenty name states that no longer exist. There are six reliable routes to the answer, and none of them requires reading the script.

Six routes to the country

1. The currency. The unit beside the number is often in Latin letters even when the country name is not, and currency names are far less ambiguous than they look. A denomination in piastres, annas, centavos, öre, para or kopecks narrows the field to a handful of countries immediately.
2. The script itself. You do not have to read it, only recognise it. Arabic script points at North Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan; Devanagari at India and Nepal; Cyrillic at the Soviet space, Bulgaria, Serbia and Mongolia; Amharic at Ethiopia.
3. The portrait. A monarch's head with no country name is the classic British Commonwealth pattern; other countries show a president or a national founder whose face is more recognisable than the lettering.
4. The emblem. Coats of arms, crescent and star, hammer and sickle, a specific animal – national symbols are designed to be recognised without words, which is exactly what you need here.
5. The postal union inscription. Many countries printed a line in French or English for international mail. If you see a familiar-looking word among unfamiliar ones, it is usually the country name in French.
6. The state that no longer exists. Ceylon, Siam, Persia, Bohemia and Moravia, Tanganyika, Upper Volta – a name you cannot find on a modern map is a strong dating clue as well as a country.

Traps worth knowing

• The city is not the country. A place name in the design is a subject, not an issuer.
• Overprints change the issuer. A stamp of one country overprinted for use in another belongs, for cataloguing, to the overprinting authority – the mechanics are in the guide to overprints and surcharges.
• Occupation and colonial issues often carry two names, and the one that matters is usually the smaller line.
• Cinderellas. Labels that look like stamps – charity seals, poster stamps, local fantasies – have no issuing country at all, because no post office stands behind them.

Then use the shape of the catalogue

Once you have a candidate, the archive settles it quickly, because it is organised country first. It holds 80,472 stamp images from 271 countries and territories, and each country page shows its date range and its issue count, so a wrong guess reveals itself immediately – the design you are holding simply will not be there. The largest sections are the Soviet Union with 6,423 images, India with 5,825 and Indonesia with 5,452, which is also a fair map of what turns up most often in mixed lots.

Open the catalogue: world stamps, Soviet stamps.

What to do once you have it

1. Move on to the denomination and the date clues, in the order set out in the guide to identifying an old stamp.
2. Measure the perforation before concluding which catalogue entry you have, as in the guide to perforation.
3. Record the country in your list even when the rest is unresolved – a country alone makes the item findable later, per the guide to cataloguing a collection.