In this talk, I will engage with various genres of medieval writing about ancient Egypt and suggest that Islamic authors did not have a comprehensive framework to analyze the past. Instead, their writing strategies and conclusions were conditioned by their individual concerns and the genre in which they wrote. Medieval scholars had a fascination with the ancient past, not just of Egypt, but of Persia, pre-Islamic Arabia, Greece, and Yemen as well. However, their reasons for recording these histories and what they chose to include in their works varied for each region. For instance, Greek history was intellectual above all else. Greek sciences and philosophy influenced Islamic learning in a myriad of ways, and thus it was this intellectual linkage that scholars wished to emphasize. Understanding why medieval scholars focused on certain aspects of ancient Egypt has been puzzling for many modern scholars, and it seems as if medieval scholars were also not unified about what their audiences should learn from this history. I will examine “wonder” literature and tales of supernatural events, an attempt to translate the hieroglyphs, and various myths that emerged or were transplanted onto the Egyptian past. These stories appear in chronicles, treatises, and other compendia that emerged from the 10th-14th centuries. The accounts to be analyzed include those of al-Idrisi, al-Mubashshir ibn Fatik, al-Suyuti, ibn Wahshiyya, and others. Modern scholars have tended to look at such texts in order to determine whether or not medieval people had a connection to Pharaonic Egypt, arguing for either a complete break with the past or for some regional nostalgia or even proto-nationalistic sentiment. I contend that medieval authors saw a need to explain the past, because the past was so visibly written on Egypt’s landscape, and that they did this through established genres and tropes. Focusing on the different genres in which scholars wrote and their strategies to rationalize the past, we can appreciate the diversity of medieval perceptions of ancient Egypt.