In late 1875 and early 1876, Emperor Yohannes IV of Ethiopia dealt the Egyptian army a pair of devastating defeats, marking the beginning of a process that would culminate in the ouster of Khedive Isma‘il amid mounting debts and the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. This paper examines the conflict through a history of information. It begins by situating the local production of knowledge at Egyptian outposts in present-day Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia within the information regime of the Egyptian Empire at its apex. Turning then to the battlefields of Gundet and Gura, it examines how news of the catastrophe circulated between the imperial frontier and the metropole at a moment just before the rapid expansion of the Arabic mass press in Egypt. Finally, the paper briefly considers how the events of 1875-6 figured in public discourse at subsequent moments of renewed scrutiny of Egyptian-Ethiopian relations, charting in the process a history of official forgetting. While the manufacture and dissemination of knowledge were integral to the plan for imperial expansion, the paper argues, imperial shrinkage fertilized a new logic of silence. Its echoes have reverberated in the century and a half since. This research draws on close reading of maps, government correspondence, memoirs, and printed journals, most notably al-Waqa’i‘ al-Misriyya, the Egyptian official gazette. Approaching the circulation of information from above (government officials and cartographers) and below (soldiers), the paper weighs the significance of conduits both human and machine, the effects of rumor, and the role of the state in promoting and suppressing accounts of the empire’s ebb and flow. By underscoring the significance of places long deemed peripheral to Egyptian history, it makes the case for a more porous definition of Middle East studies.