Writing a history of Egyptology ‘in Egypt’ is a daunting task as it involves describing the multiple histories of all the many nationalities, ethnicities and modes of government that operated within the framework of the Egyptian state, particularly from the time of the viceroy Mehmet Ali until the revolution of 1952. Politics and personalities, too, helped shape the discipline, though there are considerable lacunae in our knowledge of how the latter in particular affected the development of Egyptian Egyptology. Thus, the story of Egyptology in Egypt was actually written not only by Egyptians, but also by Turks, Armenians, French, Germans, British and Italians, as well as other nationalities, all of which worked for the different versions of the Antiquities Service and constituted the cosmopolitan population of Egypt. These various groups also responded to the antiquities in myriad ways, consciously or not, thus contributing to the different attitudes to the role that ancient Egypt played in their lives and Egyptian popular culture, sometimes influenced by Islamic attitudes to the pagan waqt al-jahilaya (time of ignorance), when anything prior to monotheism was not of interest.