It is notoriously difficult to write the history of Egypt with the so-called classical Abbasid sources, best exemplified by the famous al-Tabari (d. 301/923). Indeed, both the pre-Islamic Egyptian past and the first centuries of Islam are usually poorly documented in non-Egyptian narrative sources (the conquest of the province being the most notable exception). Yet, the reasons behind this dearth of information have never been properly addressed. Why is Egypt so absent from the grand narrative offered by Muslim chronicles? Does this reflect a lack of available material to work with or rather a deliberate attempt at silencing the past? This problem is all the more vexing if one considers the central role of the province under the Umayyads and the early Abbasids, or if one looks at the abundant evidence offered by the documentary sources and chiefly the papyri. Such an investigation is important because this historiographical situation reinforces the notion of Egyptian’s exceptionalism. It thus prevents us from adopting a less centralized view of the first Islamic Empire under the first two dynasties of Islam. My paper will suggest that a different approach to the source material, from a history of memory perspective, can help us make sense of the limited place devoted to Egypt in classical Abbasid-era historiography. It invites us to move away from the quest of historical “truth”, to rather focus on how Abbasid-era scholars (chiefly in the 3rd/9th and 4th/10th centuries) wished to remember their own past and the new meanings they granted to it by putting it into new written contexts. Looking at Muslim and non-Muslim sources, my paper thus aims to investigate the circulation of historical information and the construction of the past in (and about) early Islamic Egypt. Such an investigation forces us to consider memory and oblivion in the medieval sources themselves, in order to shed light on the making of a “cultural memory” of early Islam.