In the historiography of Egyptian nationalism it is well established that ideas about the remote past were important in the formation of a national consciousness in the nineteenth century. In "Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs" (1986), Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski trace the beginnings of self-conscious Egyptian patriotism to the writings of Rif??a al-?ah??w? in the 1860s and 1870s, noting the praise this author repeatedly bestows on Pharaonic Egypt in his historical works. Two books have been devoted to the subject in English, Donald Reid’s "Whose Pharaohs?" (2002) and Elliott Colla’s "Conflicted Antiquities" (2007), both of which highlight the discipline of archaeology as a site of contestation with the European imperial powers and, hence, the loaded symbolism of the ancient past in emergent local conceptions of Egyptian identity. One text that has not received sufficient attention in this context is the early B?l?q publication "Bid?yat al-qudam?? wa-hid?yat al-?ukam??" (1838), the first printed work in the field of European-influenced “ancient history” in Arabic. Produced by students of al-?ah??w?’s at Mehmed Ali’s Madrasat al-Alsun and reprinted in 1865 for use in schools, "Bid?yat al-qudam??" combines sections derived from earlier Arabic historiography with sections translated, with extensive adaptation, from French works of “universal history.” The preface, which was authored by al-?ah??w? himself, has been discussed by Youssef Choueiri in Modern Arab Historiography (1989), but the main body of the work has yet to be considered by scholars. This paper begins with an investigation into the sources of "Bid?yat al-qudam??," the most important of which is not identified in the Arabic. Building on the source analysis, the paper then focuses on the sections dealing with ancient Egyptian, Phoenician, and Greek history respectively. It is argued that while the section on ancient Egypt features elements that bespeak a particular sense of intimacy with the material, the text as a whole is distinguished by an emphatic universalism, by contrast with the narrow Eurocentrism of the French sources. Yet, it is suggested that in following the division of universal history into quasi-national histories characteristic of the French sources, "Bid?yat al-qudam??" nevertheless marks an important phase in the formation of a discourse of national identity in Arabic. The paper thus sheds light on one of the processes by which the imaginary boundaries of nationhood were erected in Arabic culture, as well as drawing attention to the tradition of a universalism without borders on which these boundaries were imposed.