Marie Benedict sets Daughter of Egypt during a period of turmoil and contradiction in early 1920s Egypt. The era marked a peak of Western archaeological activity, often called a “golden age,” where wealthy European patrons like Lord Carnarvon funded excavations in the Valley of the Kings. This flurry of activity, culminating in Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, fueled a global “Egyptomania.” However, this Western obsession with Egyptian antiquities occurred within the fraught political landscape of the British Protectorate, a system formally established in 1914 that gave the British political and military control over Egypt. The novel’s timeline coincides with a powerful surge in Egyptian nationalism, led by Saad Zaghloul and the Wafd Party, which demanded independence from British rule. The author’s Introduction describes this climate as a “powder keg” (x) of social and political unrest. The 1919 revolution, a nationwide uprising against British occupation, exemplified this tension and directly impacts the characters, who are forced to flee the country amid strikes and demonstrations. This sociopolitical conflict frames the novel’s central debate over cultural heritage. The traditional system of partage, devised in part by the British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, allowed foreign excavators to keep a share of their findings (Serageldin, Mohamed. “Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage; Repatriation against Borders.” Muse Magazine, Canadian Museums Association, 2023.). This practice came under fire. Benedict addresses this in the novel through Lord Carnarvon’s half-brother, Aubrey, who warns that an independent Egyptian government would naturally want to “oversee their own history and their own artifacts” (123), a sentiment echoed when Zaghloul himself tells Eve that Egypt’s past is “our story to tell” (129). This tension between colonial-era archaeology and the quest for national self-determination highlights the complex legacy of exploration and ownership.