In Egypt, tourism is a variation on the kinds of travel and cross-cultural transactions – colonialism and imperialism, religious and intellectual pilgrimages, archaeology, anthropology, and more – that have for centuries been critical elements in building Egyptian national identities and subjectivities. Two very different cultural imaginations of Egypt shape tourist agendas. Western tourism is built around a fantasy of an ancient Egypt littered with the excavated monuments of a pharaonic past, a…