Para - Selim III French Occupation

Interestingly, the coins for regnal year 13 and 14 (French Occupation by Napoleon Bonaparte, KM#145) are slightly lighter, having a mean value 0,238 gr from the 6 samples in Zeno. However, such small quantities are not statistically significant and bigger numbers are needed to confirm this assumption.

There are some very interesting comments in Zeno by user Vincent(#41397 - French occupation, BI para, Misr, 1203AH, regnal year 14. "R".):

I see that there's a notion that the coins dated '13', '14' and '15' are those that are relevant to consider in terms of whether they were issued by the French administration or the Ottoman administration. I've had a look at Lecompte's catalogue of French colonial coinage and see that he is in agreement with this.
I have noticed something odd, though. According to Lecompte, the (two digit) dates on the French occupation issues do not represent regnal years of Selim III, on the contrary, they represent the last two digits of the Hijra date, i.e. AH1213, AH1214 and AH1215. It is not clear if Lecompte is aware that this is in direct contradiction to normal practice on Ottoman coins. I might have assumed that this was a simple misunderstanding on Lecompte's part, had it not been because it is clear that there is actually some serious studies of documentary evidence that has gone into this, and then of course the fact that using Selim III's regnal years might be an odd thing for the French to do, given that they were the Sultan's direct adversaries. On the other hand, I have noticed that Lingen is not very impressed with this catalogue's treatment of Moghul style French colonial coinage from India, i.e. another intersection between French and classical Oriental numismatics.
According to Lecompte, the Cairo mint was under French administration from July 26th 1798 to July 7th 1801, except for an interruption (with Ottoman administration) from February 19th to May 13th 1800.
Now, if Lecompte's contention - the dates being abbreviated Hijra years - is correct, then it would follow that the years '13', '14', '15' and '16' are worth considering, given that July 26th 1798 occurred in early AH1213 and July 7th 1801 occurred in early AH1216. In this case, we would have the problem that Selim III regained control of Cairo during his regnal year 13, and thus, dates '13' through '16' on the coins could be interpreted as either (AH12)13 through (AH12)16 (implying French control) or regnal years 13 through 16 (implying Ottoman control).
Alternatively, Selim III's regnal years could have been used throughout, i.e. also by the French administration. (I assume that each regnal year in the Ottoman Imperial calendar - including regnal year 1 (!) - consisted of one full Hijra year of 354 days). In that case, regnal years '10' through '13' would be relevant to consider, given that r.y. 10 lasted from December 1797 to December 1798, r.y. 11 lasted from December 1798 to December 1799, r.y. 12 lasted from December 1799 to November 1800 and r.y. 13 lasted from November 1800 to November 1801.
Supposedly, there's a document from the French mint director, S. Bernard, which might solve the problem, but I don't have access to it.
So, I've tried to clarify the problems involved for the sake of discussion. I don't know if any of these things have been sorted out and to which extent they have been clarified.
I'm also not sure if there are differences in the weight and fineness of the French issues viz-a-viz the Ottoman issues. I feel it's a bit dangerous to do comparisons with only a small number of coins to compare (particularly in the case of the larger, scarcer types). First of all, an individual coin could be an outlier (statistically speaking), and secondly, it's necessary to compare like with like, e.g. either compare nominal, prescribed weight and fineness or compare the properties of actual physical coins.

By the way, the fact that the gold coins carrying the letter ب (B for Bonaparte) instead of a date are French occupation issues is known due to information in the document by S. Bernard. (Letters replacing a date is a phenomenon occasionally found on Ottoman coins from this time period generally speaking, it is not specific to French issues).

In my first comment I pointed out that there are two possibilities: 1) the French used abbreviated Hijra dates, (AH12)13 through (AH12)16, instead of Selim III's regnal years, or 2) the regnal years of Selim III were used without interruption, also during the French occupation. In the first scenario, both the French administration and the subsequent Ottoman administration would have produced coins with dates in the '13' to '16' range, while neither would have produced coins dated '11' or '12'.
So, are there any Selim III coins from Egypt dated '11' or '12'? I consulted Stephen Album's checklist to see if he comments on the matter, but that covers the Ottoman Empire only up to 1687 and then points to the SCWC (Krause) catalogues. The SCWC catalogue (18th century) lists an akce of year 11 ("Reported, not confirmed"), a para of year 11, a para of year 12 and a 5 para of year 12 (illustrated). Our database has a para from year 12 (Zeno# 41601). I haven't been able to find an image of a year 11 para, but supposedly there was one or more of them included in lot no. 1533 in Künker's auction no. 210 (see auction catalogue here, it's on p. 121). This is a specialized Ottoman coin sale. Now, the Cairo mint was under Ottoman control during February to May 1800. As far as I can tell, that would only explain the year 12 coins, not the year 11 coins.
I am getting rather sceptical with regard to the idea that the French introduced a dating system of their own, rather than using the one that was already in place, i.e. the regnal years of Selim III. Still, it would be nice to get visual confirmation of any year 11 coins. Also, I have ordered a book on traditional Islamic calendars from a library in order to make sure that there isn't some aspect of the Ottoman calendar that somehow changes the equation - although I can't see how that could be the case.