The expansiveness of Ahdaf Soueif’s novel In the Eye of the Sun is not to be underestimated. The novel narrates the period between 1967 and 1981, crucial years that mark a turning point in modern Egypt’s national history: the defeat in the Six-Day War inaugurates Egyptians’ disillusionment with pan-Arabism as well as the waning of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab socialism and paves the way for Anwar Sadat’s neo-liberalism. In narrating this political history, the novel problematizes attempts at neat, comfortable categorizations, foregoing teleology in place of re-tracings and repetitions. By ordering these historical events through innovative modes of emplotment, Soueif’s novel upsets modernist narratives of progression. Examining the epilogue – itself outside of the temporal demands of a novel – I focus my analysis on the epilogue’s representation of an ancient Egyptian artifact, specifically an unnamed idol that the protagonist, Asya, accidentally finds lying face down in the sand at an excavation site in a remote village in rural Egypt. Soueif’s focus on the ancient idol situates her in relation to masculinist Eurocentric discourses of Egyptology. The most obvious, among many, fault of these hegemonic discourses is that they center power struggles between European colonial rivalries while consistently evacuating modern Egyptians from the narrative – especially women, people from rural areas, or the working classes. Through a close reading of the figure of the ancient Egyptian idol, I contend that Soueif rescues it from warring hegemonic discourses and actively engages in re-signifying the ancient artifact within the horizon of the political moment in which she is narrating, that of the transition from Nasser to Sadat. Centering the excavation site in the remote village before the idol becomes an artifact, with no Egyptologists or Archeologists in sight, Soueif saves the ancient idol from a temporal upset in the museum. Ultimately, I propose that ending the novel with this image offers a decolonial national history, one that centers a polyvocal community, women’s collective voices, and an indigenous Egyptology.