["Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 517-534, September 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThe article examines bandit myths from a socio‐historical perspective, as part of the socio‐cultural reality of present‐day Egypt. It engages in the semiotics of banditry encouraged by Stephanie Cronin by taking a first step towards a social semiotics analysis of Rayyā and Sakīna, the two Egyptian female criminals par excellence, arrested in 1920 and executed in 1921. I will argue that Rayyā and Sakīna's criminal myth is currently being resignified in terms that can be conceived of as social banditry. Ethnography, press, and broadcast sources help to highlight two different recent shifts towards bandit myths, linked respectively to national and local circulation.\n"]