In the mid-1950s, the Egyptian government launched a rigorous “recovery” operation aimed at collecting the nation’s musical heritage and publishing it in a series of songbooks. These books took what was, until then, a largely oral tradition of music and transformed it into neatly notated scores and poetic texts, testaments to Egypt’s venerable artistic heritage. Yet, the editors of these songbooks engaged in more than preservation: they created a musical canon based on their own particular visions of the nation, sanitizing a living repertoire and constructing new categories of “folk” and “classical” music. In this paper, I focus on songbook collections published by the Supreme Music Council and folklorist Bahija Rashid, examining how Egypt’s cultural elite attempted to curate a heritage that was pure and orderly, ancient as well as modern. I investigate the inclusion and exclusion of particular songs, lyrics, and historical narratives, and their relevance within the broader project of inventing Egyptian musical heritage. While the state’s publications were novel in their use of notated melodies, I also discuss how these books drew on an older tradition of Arabic song anthologies to authenticate the heritagization project.