The heart of this paper seeks to explore the ways in which enslaved knowledge and labor served as a foundation for nineteenth century empires in the Nile Valley, through perhaps the least likely of sources: European travelogues. Orientalists traveling in the Middle East and Africa, wrote extensively about the lives, customs, and culture of the people they lived among, sparking off an entire industry of travel writings. Historians and other scholars depended on these writings as key sources for their tomes, at least until Edward Said’s famous Orientalism offered an alternative reading of these texts. Rather than serving as objective facts, they were probed as reflections of the authors’ desires and concerns rooted and inherent to imperialism. Understandably, scholars of Northeast Africa increasingly set aside these problematic sources in favor of Arabic, Amharic, Ottoman, or others which centered indigenous knowledge. But is there a way to analyze this massive, problematic source base for localized knowledge? Following in the methodological footsteps of Ann Stoler and Marissa Fuentes, this paper revisits European travelogues by reading them “along the archival grain.” It examines six of these journeys in the Nile Valley as sites of indigenous knowledge production, specifically, enslaved knowledge production. Nineteenth century European travelers may have translated existing hierarchies into legible European categories, but their own journeys—the routes, the labor, and often the language skills—depended on local geographies, work, and interpretation. The freed slave working as an interpreter, the woman captured while fleeing her village and forced to serve as guide, porters rented from slavers for the day, week, or month to carry the shells for trade or grain for sustenance: enslaved knowledge and labor built empires in Northeast Africa. During a period of rapidly shifting empires, expansion and consolidation required intermediaries and slaves often forcibly filled these roles. Looking across the Nile Valley, from Egypt to Ethiopia, this paper does not attempt to “uplift” enslaved voices from the archives of history, but rather to illuminate how these archives are embedded within their knowledge.