This paper explores the connection of the bodies and spirits of the Egyptian revolutionaries to Tahrir Square, how the symbolic power this space gained through their presence was developed in literary discourse, and how military government, along with its civilian lackeys, tried to co-opt this power in the interests of legitimating its rule. The analysis is based on materials found in the archive of paper texts hosted by www.tahrirdocuments.org. Following the January 25th Egyptian Revolution, there has been a continued struggle between the Egyptian revolutionaries and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the ruling military junta. The SCAF oversaw the recycling of the rumuz (“symbols”, or, as Tahrir Documents translators have rendered it, “figureheads”) of the Mubarak regime into new positions in civilian government. These men were indeed direct representatives, symbols, of the old order, and immediately became the targets of the continuing revolution. The rumuz, along with the SCAF, the police, and the forces of the Interior Ministry, sought to control the symbolic power of Tahrir Square through various means, such as curfews, violence, and the continuation of the emergency law. At times, elites from this (re)new(ed) establishment entered the square in attempts to wrest revolutionary legitimacy away from the assembled masses—whose presence itself empowered the revolutionary status of the Square. During frequent clashes, the physical representations of despotism’s persistence under military rule appeared: bloodied heads, blinded eyes, crushed limbs, and corpses. The dima' [the plural form of blood] and arwah [souls] of the martyrs, which played a central role in the literary discourse of the early days of the revolution against Husni Mubarak, persisted in the prose and poetry of the revolutionaries in order to assert their revolutionary legitimacy in the face of military rule. Here, conceptions of martyrdom are taken up by the investigation as one of the most frequent claims of the Egyptian revolutionaries to revolutionary legitimacy. By analyzing the central role of the revolutionarily empowered symbol of Tahrir Square and the multiple claims to it by competing post-revolutionary forces in Egypt, this paper attempts to explain the ways in which space functions as a legitimating authority.