Fascination with Egypt either as a site of antiquity or an imagined Orientalist landscape was a distinctive hallmark of cinema beginning with its emergence in 1896. Yet, except for a handful of celebrated 'silent' epics produced in France, Italy, and the United States, films made in Egypt from 1896-1913 have failed to attract serious scholarly inquiry. In part, this scholarly neglect stems from the fact that Egyptian cinema before the First World War largely consisted of 'actualities' (such as royal and state occasions or sporting events) or 'interest' films (such as travelogues and ethnographic films), which were short in length and intended primarily for projection in urban cinema halls. In this paper, I argue that these films constitute a rich, if frustrating, field of archival material that demand further exploration and analysis. Short films dealing with diverse subjects ranging from nationalist funerals to archaeological excavations invite numerous theoretical and methodological research questions, which are relevant not only to cinematic history and its process of archivisation, but also to the 'Global Middle East' and broader cultural studies. Accordingly, I maintain that the cinematic output from this period cannot be understood simply as 'Egyptian' film. Rather, it represents a charting of local and transnational histories that reveal both the aesthetic/commercial investments that went into identifying with fluid social identities and competing nationalist ideologies. I therefore sketch out some key theoretical and methodical issues and possible research strategies with the explicit aim of encouraging multidisciplinary conversations by Middle East historians with other scholarly disciplines. Specifically, I engage with Ziad Fahmy's call to pay serious attention to sounds and soundscapes in studying Egyptian history and to refrain from historical narratives of the past that are soundproof and devocalized. By examining 'silent' films that were made in Egypt during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we can begin a discussion of cinema that serves as a fruitful starting point for crafting more sensorially grounded historical narratives.