This book deals with time in the Cairo trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz, even if it is mainly the first part Impasse of the Two Palaces and the last one - The Garden of the Past - that are analyzed.In this study, the feeling of mastery of time that animates the paternal and patriarchal figure of the hero of theImpasse of the Two Palaces is discussed, but it is damaged and degraded by the irruption of historical time . Then will be declined the whole Mahfouzian paradigm of time around the two major categories of the object of nostalgia (the time of the memory) and the destructive object (the time, novelistic hero).