Muḥammad Amīn Fikrī’s 1878 book “Jughrāfiyat Miṣr” is often heralded as the first Arabic-language Egyptian book to approach Egypt’s geography in a European and territorial manner. This paper argues otherwise, positing instead that Fikrī’s contribution was built on a longer process of nineteenth-century geographical writing in Egypt that took an increasingly administrative and territorial turn. After revisiting the impact of Rifāʿah Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī’s geographical writings and translations, this paper explores the little-studied geographical books of two mid-nineteenth-century Egyptian state officials, Muḥammad Qadrī Pasha and Muḥammad Mukhtār Pasha, that preceded and influenced Fikrī’s work. These texts represent early and important transformations in Egyptian approaches to their geography driven by the khedival state’s centralized and bureaucratized state-building efforts. They outlined multiple and contradictory conceptions of Egyptian territory that sought to delineate the bounds of Egypt proper as well as lands subjected to khedival administration and imperialism. They also illustrate early proto-nationalist formulations of Egyptian geography as the site of Egyptian progress and modernity within the confines of the khedival state. As such, the territorialization of Egyptian geography was not simply a consequence of translating and importing European approaches to political space but also a direct product of the growing administrative reach of the Egyptian state over its people and lands. By examining these geographical writings in their intellectual and political contexts, this paper further argues that the written word played a significant role in defining the Egyptian geo-body, highlighting the significance of non-cartographic representations of the geo-body to the territorialization of political space. To that end, nineteenth-century Egyptian officials engaged with the revival of Islamic geographical texts and their literary descriptions of Egypt to help naturalize the vague and inconsistent boundaries of Egypt as pre-existing territorial lines and define in the process the administrative bounds of the khedival state. As a result, Egyptian conceptions of their own political geography shifted away from that of a network of urban spaces connected to an administrative center toward that of a bounded, surface-of-the-earth spatial extension of the state. This paper concludes that the making of the territorial Egyptian geo-body as we know it today preceded the formal production of borders and challenges the historiographic notion that Egypt’s territorial scope was largely the product of British efforts and interests.