A successful trick of the first Romani tribes was to introduce themselves as Egyptian pilgrims to get more alms when they began travelling through Western Europe in the early fifteenth century. The fact that their leaders used titles like Count or Duke of Little Egypt meant they were telling the truth, but they didn’t come from North Africa. Instead, they hailed from a settlement called Little Egypt, probably the one outside the city of Modon (in the Greek Peloponnese). However, Egyptian sounds much more interesting when associated with the land of magicians, generally known from the books of Moses in the Bible. According to a book about conjuring tricks, printed in London in 1612, in the early sixteenth century ‘certain Egyptians’ had appeared in England who practiced not only palmistry and fortune-telling but also performed magic tricks previously unknown in England. Such reports raise the question of whether the arrival of those ‘Egyptians’ reinforced the interest in old magical practices and conjuring tricks in Western Europe. Many sixteenth-century artworks of various subjects mirrored the popularity of their fortune-telling and conjuring shows. A palm-reading ‘Egyptian’ can illustrate cheating as an instance of deceit and folly, but also chiromancy in a serious scientific context, while the conjurer was used to illustrate the stupidity of his audience. Nevertheless, only a thin line separated magic tricks from witchcraft, and the ‘Gypsy Witch’ also became a popular character.