Biographical dictionaries have long been a part of Arabic culture. For reasons to be discussed, there are more of these for modern Asyut than there are for most other Egyptian cities. The paper to be presented revolves around these books and how they should be read and around the larger implied question of why Asyut produced more of them than other cities did. This last part of the paper relies on what is called in geography “secondary city” theory. Cairo is of course the primate city. An early example of a biographical dictionary tied to Asyut is the 1917 Kinz al-thamin lil-`uzama’ al-Misriyin . It was composed by Faraj Sulayman Fu’ad, a journalist, who was born in Asyut and worked later in Cairo. The work contains information about many people in Asyut and Upper Egypt, bits on Asyuti politics as seen by someone rooted there but who was drawn to Cairo after WW 1 but curiously not to the Wafd. Faraj Sulayman Fu’ad admired Muhammad Farid, and he worked with Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid. Kinz al-thamin is to be contrasted with a series of biographical dictionaries put out in more recent years by the former Asyut governor, Muhammad Raja’i al-Tahlawi. These appear to be more directed toward the nation and the world and less toward activities in Asyut per se beyond the recording of various individuals births. By the 1960’s, many people from Asyut had reputations from their careers in Cairo. The paper offers another rationale that in the Asyuti elite thinking following our single best- known source, `Uthman Fayd-Allah, Madinat Asyut (1940)(2010) combined with what we know of the migration of the elite in the interwar period, the 1920’s was the city’s golden age and so more recent achievements there are not looked at in the same way. A third genre of biographical dictionaries which cover Asyut are those spinning off the more recent Cairo-centered reference works such as Al-Dhahab al-manqut fi ta’rikh a`yan Asyut (2008 )by Muhyi ad-Din al-Tu`mi. The paper builds on earlier scholarship by MESA scholars Reiker and Whidden, who have worked with some of the same materials, but argues for a different kind of reading based on the use and adaptation of Secondary City theory.