This paper examines incidences of rape during the ‘revolution’ of March 1919 in Egypt. I demonstrate first of all that the uprising was the occasion for multiple incidents of sexual violence which have received relatively little scholarly attention. This violence was overwhelmingly, but not solely, perpetrated by British soldiers, notably in a number of villages in Giza. As Beth Baron has demonstrated, accounts of these atrocities were taken up by the nationalist movement, who regarded them as synonymous with the ‘rape of the nation’ by the British. They attracted worldwide press coverage as calls for Egyptian independence grew louder—though what captured European imaginations in Egypt was the rape, real or imagined, of white women by ‘native’ men. Other incidents attracted scarcely any attention at all, since, I argue, they presented no political utility to anybody, for example the rape of Armenian women by Egyptian men, ostensibly in revenge for Armenian collaboration with the British. I next examine a number of documents in which Egyptian women who had survived rape by soldiers directly confronted the British authorities with their claims. I argue that the British response was primarily determined by the political imperative of acquitting their army of any accusations that might bolster the case for Egyptian independence, demonstrating how this response was structured in practice around a combination of classic ‘rape myths’ of the kind which informed British law and legal practice at the time, and cultural stereotypes about Islam, the Orient, and the reliability of ‘native women’. In the aftermath of the events, these impressionistic claims about the Egyptians’ allegations took precedence in British discourse over even the highly tendentious versions of events established by official enquiries, thereby completing the silencing of the Egyptian women who had testified about their rapes.