Nobody knew it got sampled from an old Egyptian song, in fact very few do even now..
here is the instrumental used for the song

and here is the original if you want to check it out which was a debut song for a movie back in the 50s ...

The song was composed by the late Egyptian composer Baligh Hamdy

Baligh's family tried to claim copyright ownership a few years ago but lost the case because the Egyptian law of "moral property" did not apply in an American court of law

Funny how the song is called "Khusara" which means "loss" in Arabic
So Jay Z got away with it and the composer remained Timbaland

In other words they big pimped the song

Many are such cases of music plagiarism that can be found all around us