Amulet Tales: Race, Magic, and Medicine in Egypt uses amuletic objects as archives to reveal how Upper Egyptian and Black African women healers—and the amulets they wielded—shaped the global development of anthropological expertise and the robust spiritual economy of healing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. Despite repeated campaigns by government officials and doctors to discredit their knowledge and outlaw their practices, wise women controlled a widespread market in occult objects that remained crucial in the everyday lives of Egyptians. The project combines Middle East history’s rich foundation of women’s and gender history, with insights from science and technology studies, critical race theory, and budding scholarship on the Islamicate occult sciences, to consider how racialized constructions of the Upper Egyptian and Black African women—along with the socio-medical, spiritual, and economic worlds they inhabited—shaped the making of “modern” Egypt. The development of anthropological thought in interwar Egypt and abroad, Moore argues, hinged on the study of “superstitious” healing practices (khorafa) or “old wives medicine” (tibb al-rukka) attributed to Upper Egyptian and enslaved and manumitted Black African healing practitioners. Wise women and their amulets found themselves entangled in the internationalization of social sciences not as mere objects of study or ‘go-betweens’ but critical producers of knowledge.