This paper focusses on a little-known group of translators of the early nineteenth century, who made some of the first Arabic translations of European Enlightenment writings. Based around the household of a wealthy Syrian Christian merchant in Damietta, Egypt, this circle translated Enlightenment scientific, fictional and historical works from Greek and other languages, through the 1800s and 1810s. Using the surviving manuscript translations, now scattered in various European and Middle Eastern libraries, and accounts from travellers and missionaries, I seek to answer the question of what was novel about this early and hitherto overlooked translation enterprise, and how it can revise our views of the later Nahda. The Damietta circle can potentially claim a number of ‘firsts’ in Arabic translation: the first translations of European novels, of Voltaire and Volney, of Enlightenment European work on the natural sciences. It might be tempting to write it into a familiar account of the advent of modernity, following on from the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798: modernity’s arrival would then be backdated by a few decades, from Mehmed Ali’s translation and printing project, which reached a peak in the 1830s and 1840s, to these Syrian translators of the 1800s and 1810s. But a closer examination of the contexts of the Damietta circle reveals elements that complicate this straightforward account of the arrival of modernity from Western Europe. Although they had contact with Western Europeans, including the French of the Napoleonic occupation, the Damietta translators were not working directly from English or French works, but largely from Greek translations of the eighteenth-century Modern Greek Enlightenment. They were linked to the Greeks by the ties of Orthodox Christianity as well as trans-Mediterranean trade, suggesting a circuitous Mediterranean route for the arrival of these ‘modern’ texts into Arabic. Meanwhile, Damietta in this period was already known as a centre of intellectual enquiry among both Muslims and Christians; and what evidence we have of the reception of the Damietta translations points less to a simple transmission of European sciences than to dialogue between them and pre-existing knowledge of subjects such as astronomy, physics or religion, leading to further creative intellectual work. As well as revising the standard periodisation of the Nahda, then, the example of the Damietta circle calls into question the notion of the early nineteenth century as above all an age of the transmission of knowledge from Western Europe to the Arab East.