This article explores the appeal of waqf as a property regime for the control of land and water resources in the eighteenth-century Egyptian Delta. Specifically, it focuses on the socio-economic and legal logics that informed local households’ use of waqf around the cities of Rosetta and Damietta (Ar. Dimyāṭ). Waqf was part of a strategy of capital accumulation, household formation, and social reproduction in Egypt, as it was throughout the early modern Ottoman Empire. Drawing on the rich surviving records of the Islamic courts of Rosetta and Damietta, I analyze a market in waqf property that in many ways approximated a regime of private property. The culture of the Islamic courts and the priorities of property holders in the northern Delta form the subject of the first three sections of this article. I also explore the environmental, geographic, and political limits of waqf property for creating and maintaining a stable land regime in the Delta at the end of the eighteenth century. In the final two sections, I discuss a divergence in the economic fortunes and political profiles of these two seemingly similar regions in the Egyptian Delta. This comparison sheds light on the local factors that shaped the implementation of waqf as a strategy for controlling land and water prior to the widespread introduction of private property on agricultural land in the nineteenth century.