S. Rappoport - History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12)

S >> S. Rappoport >> History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12)

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We have traced the fall of the Greek party in Alexandria, in the
victories over the Arians during the religious quarrels of the last
hundred years; and in the laws we now read the city's loss of wealth
and power. The corporation of Alexandria was no longer able to bear the
expense of cleansing the river and keeping open the canals; and four
hundred _solidi_--about twelve hundred dollars--were each year set apart
from the custom-house duties of the city for that useful work.

The arrival of new settlers in Alexandria had been very much checked by
the less prosperous state of the country since the reign of Diocletian.
We still find, however, that many of the men of note were not born in
Egypt. Paulus, the physician, was a native of AEgina. He has left a work
on diseases and their remedies. The chief man of learning was Synesius,
a platonic philosopher whom the patriarch Theophilus persuaded to join
the Christians. As a platonist he naturally leaned towards many of
the doctrines of the popular religion, but he could not believe in a
resurrection; and it was not till after Theophilus had ordained him
Bishop of Ptolemais near Cyrene that he acknowledged the truth of that
doctrine. Nor would he then put away or disown his wife, as the
custom of the Church required; indeed, he accepted the bishopric very
unwillingly. He was as fond of playful sport as he was of books, and
very much disliked business. He has left a volume of writings, which has
saved the names of two prefects of Cyrene; the one Anysius, under
whose good discipline even the barbarians of Hungary behaved like Roman
legionaries, and the other Poonius, who cultivated science in this
barren spot. To encourage Pasonius in his praiseworthy studies he made
him a present of an astrolabe, to measure the distances of the stars
and planets, an instrument which was constructed under the guidance of
Hypatia.

Trade and industry were checked by the unsettled state of the country,
and misery and famine were spreading over the land. The African tribes
of Mazices and Auxoriani, leaving the desert in hope of plunder, overran
the province of Libya, and laid waste a large part of the Delta. The
barbarians and the sands of the desert were alike encroaching on the
cultivated fields. Nature seemed changed. The valley of the Nile was
growing narrower. Even within the valley the retreating wraters left
behind them harvests less rich, and fever more putrid. The quarries were
no longer worth working for their building stone. The mines yielded no
more gold.

On the death of Arcadius, his son Theodosius was only eight years old,
but he was quietly acknowledged as Emperor of the East in 408, and he
left the government of Egypt, as heretofore, very much in the hands of
the patriarch. In the fifth year of his reign Theophilus died; and, as
might be supposed, a successor was not appointed without a struggle for
the double honour of Bishop of Alexandria and Governor of Egypt.

[Illustration: 257.jpg QUARRIES AT TOORAH ON THE NILE]

The remains of the Greek and Arian party proposed Timotheus, an
archdeacon in the church; but the Egyptian party were united in favour
of Cyril, a young man of learning and talent, who had the advantage of
being the nephew of the late bishop. Whatever were the forms by which
the election should have been governed, it was in reality settled by a
battle between the two parties in the streets; and though Abundantius,
the military prefect, gave the weight of his name, if not the strength
of his cohort, to the party of Timotheus, yet his rival conquered,
-and Cyril was carried into the cathedral with a pomp more like a pagan
triumph than the modest ordination of a bishop.

Cyril was not less tyrannical in his bishopric than his uncle had
been before him. His first care was to put a stop to all heresy in
Alexandria, and his second to banish the Jews. The theatre was the spot
in which the riots between Jews and Christians usually began, and the
Sabbath was the time, as being the day on which the Jews chiefly crowded
in to see the dancing. On one occasion the quarrel in the theatre ran
so high that the prefect with his cohort was scarcely able to keep them
from blows; and the Christians reproached the Jews with plotting to burn
down the churches. But the Christians were themselves guilty of the very
crimes of which they accused their enemies. The next morning, as soon
as it was light, Cyril headed the mob in their attacks upon the Jewish
synagogues; they broke them open and plundered them, and in one day
drove every Jew out of the city. No Jew had been allowed to live in
Alexandria or any other city without paying a poll-tax, for leave
to worship his God according to the manner of his forefathers; but
religious zeal is stronger than the love of money; the Jews were driven
out, and the tax lost to the city.

[Illustration: 258b.jpg Street and Mosque of Mahdjiar]

Orestes, the prefect of Alexandria, had before wished to check the power
of the bishop; and he in vain tried to save the Jews from oppression,
and the state from the loss of so many good citizens. But it was useless
to quarrel with the patriarch, who was supported by the religious
zeal of the whole population. The monks of Mount Nitria and of the
neighbourhood burned with a holy zeal to fight for Cyril, as they had
before fought for Theophilus; and when they heard that a jealousy had
sprung up between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, more than
five hundred of them marched into Alexandria to avenge the affronted
bishop. They met the prefect Orestes as he was passing through the
streets in his open chariot, and began reproaching him with being a
pagan and a Greek. Orestes answered that he was a Christian, and he had
been baptised at Constantinople. But this only cleared him of the lesser
charge, he was certainly a Greek; and one of these Egyptian monks taking
up a stone threw it at his head, and the blow covered his face with
blood. They then fled from the guards and people who came up to help the
wounded prefect; but Ammonius, who threw the stone, was taken and put
to death with torture. The grateful bishop buried him in the church with
much pomp; he declared him to be a martyr and a saint, and gave him
the name of St. Thaumasius. But the Christians were ashamed of the
new martyr: and the bishop, who could not withstand the ridicule, soon
afterwards withdrew from him the title.

Bad as was this behaviour of the bishop and his friends, the most
disgraceful tale still remains to be told. The beautiful and learned
Hypatia, the daughter of Theon the mathematician, was at that time
the ornament of Alexandria and the pride of the pagans. She taught
philosophy publicly in the platonic school which had been founded by
Ammonius, and which boasted of Plotinus as its pupil. She was as modest
as she wras graceful, eloquent, and learned; and though, being a pagan,
she belonged to neither of the rival Christian parties, yet, as she
had more hearers among the Greek friends of the prefect than among the
ignorant followers of the bishop, she became an object of jealousy with
the Homoousian party. A body of these Christians, says the orthodox
historian, attacked this admirable woman in the street; they dragged
her from her chariot, and hurried her off into the church named Caesar's
temple, and there stripped her and murdered her with some broken tiles.
She had written commentaries on the mathematical works of Diophantus,
and on the conic sections of Apollonius. The story of her life has been
related in the nineteenth century by Charles Kingsley in the novel which
bears her name.

Arianism took refuge from the Egyptians within the camps of the Greek
soldiers. One church was dedicated to the honour of St. George, the late
bishop, within the lofty towers of the citadel of Babylon, which was
the strongest fortress in Egypt; and a second in the city of Ptolemais,
where a garrison was stationed to collect the toll of the Thebaid. St.
George became a favourite saint with the Greeks in Egypt, and in those
spots where the Greek soldiers were masters of the churches this Arian
and unpopular bishop was often painted on the walls riding triumphantly
on horseback and slaying the dragon of Athanasian error. On the other
hand, in Alexandria, where his rival's politics and opinions held the
upper hand, the monastery of St. Athanasius was built in the most public
spot in the city, probably that formerly held by the Soma or royal
burial-place; and in Thebes a cathedral church was dedicated to St.
Athanasius within the great courtyard of Medinet-Abu, where the
small and paltry Greek columns are in strange contrast to the grand
architecture of Ramses III. which surrounds them.

In former reigns the Alexandrians had been in the habit of sending
embassies to Constantinople to complain of tyranny or misgovernment, and
to beg for a redress of grievances, when they thought that justice could
be there obtained when it was refused in Alexandria. But this practice
was stopped by Theodosius, who made a law that the Alexandrians should
never send an embassy to Constantinople, unless it were agreed to by a
decree of the town council, and had the approbation of the prefect. The
weak and idle emperor would allow no appeal from the tyranny of his own
governor.

We may pass over the banishment of John Chrysostom, Bishop of
Constantinople, as having less to do with the history of Egypt, though,
as in the cases of Arius and Nestorius, the chief mover of the attack
upon him was a bishop of Alexandria, who accused him of heresy, because
he did not come up to the Egyptian standard of orthodoxy. But among the
bishops who were deposed with Chrysostom was Palladius of Galatia, who
was sent a prisoner to Syene. As soon as he was released from his bonds,
instead of being cast down by his misfortunes, he proposed to take
advantage of the place of his banishment, and he set forward on his
travels through Ethiopia for India, in search of the wisdom of the
Brahmins. He arrived in safety at Adule, the port on the Red Sea in
latitude 15 deg., now known as Zula, where he made acquaintance with Moses,
the bishop of that city, and persuaded him to join him in his distant
and difficult voyage.

From Adule the two set sail in one of the vessels employed in the Indian
trade; but they were unable to accomplish their purpose, and Palladius
returned to Egypt worn out with heat and fatigue, having scarcely
touched the shores of India. On his return through Thebes he met with
a traveller who had lately returned from the same journey, and who
consoled him under his disappointment by recounting his own failure in
the same undertaking. His new friend had himself been a merchant in the
Indian trade, but had given up business because he was not successful in
it; and, having taken a priest as his companion, had set out on the
same voyage in search of Eastern wisdom. They had sailed to Adule on
the Abyssinian shore, and then travelled to Auxum, the capital of that
country. From that coast they set sail for the Indian ocean, and reached
a coast which they thought was Taprobane or Ceylon. But there they were
taken prisoners, and, after spending six years in slavery, and learning
but little of the philosophy that they were in search of, were glad to
take the first opportunity of escaping and returning to Egypt. Palladius
had travelled in Egypt before he was sent there into banishment, and
he had spent many years in examining the monasteries of the Thebaid and
their rules, and he has left a history of the lives of many of those
holy men and woman, addressed to his friend Lausus.

When Nestorius was deposed from the bishopric of Constantinople for
refusing to use the words "Mother of God" as the title of Jesus'
mother, and for falling short in other points of what was then thought
orthodoxy, he was banished to Hibe in the Great Oasis. While he was
living there, the Great Oasis was overrun by the Blemmyes, the Roman
garrison was defeated, and those that resisted were put to the sword.
The Blemmyes pillaged the place and then withdrew; and, being themselves
at war with the Mazices, another tribe of Arabs, they kindly sent their
prisoners to the Thebaid, lest they should fall into the hands of
the latter. Nestorius then went to Panopolis to show himself to the
governor, lest he should be accused of running away from his place of
banishment, and soon afterwards he died of the sufferings brought on by
these forced and painful journeys through the desert.

About the same time Egypt was visited by Cassianus, a monk of Gaul, in
order to study the monastic institutions of the Thebaid. In his work on
that subject he has described at length the way of life and the severe
rules of the Egyptian monks, and has recommended them to the imitation
of his countrymen. But the natives of Italy and the West do not seem
to have been contented with copying the Theban monks at a distance. Such
was the fame of the Egyptian monasteries that many zealots from Italy
flocked there, to place themselves under the severe discipline of those
holy men. As these Latin monks did not understand either Koptic or
Greek, they found some difficulty in regulating their lives with the
wished-for exactness; and the rules of Pachomius, of Theodorus, and of
Oresiesis, the most celebrated of the founders, were actually sent to
Jerome at Rome, to be by him translated into Latin for the use of these
settlers in the Thebaid. These Latin monks made St. Peter a popular
saint in some parts of Egypt; and in the temple of Asseboua, in Nubia,
when the Christians plastered over the figure of one of the old gods,
they painted in its place the Apostle Peter holding the key in his hand.

[Illustration: 264.jpg RAMSES II. AND ST. PETER]

They did not alter the rest of the sculpture; so that Ramses II. is
there now seen presenting his offering to the Christian saint. The mixed
group gives us proof of the nation's decline in art rather than of its
improvement in religion.

Among the monks of Egypt there were also some men of learning and
industry, who in their cells in the desert had made at least three
translations of the New Testament into the three dialects of the Koptic
language; namely, the Sahidic of Upper Egypt, the Bashmuric of the
Bashmour province of the eastern half of the Delta, and the Koptic
proper of Memphis and the western half of the Delta. To these were
afterwards added the Acts of the council of Nicaea, the lives of the
saints and martyrs, the writings of many of the Christian fathers, the
rituals of the Koptic church, and various treatises on religion.

Other monks were as busy in making copies of the Greek manuscripts
of the Old and New Testament; and, as each copy must have needed the
painful labour of months, and often years, their industry and zeal must
have been great. Most of these manuscripts were on papyrus, or on a
manufactured papyrus which might be called paper, and have long since
been lost; but the three most ancient copies on parchment which are the
pride of the Vatican, the Paris library, and the British Museum, are the
work of the Alexandrian penmen.

Copies of the Bible were also made in Alexandria for sale in western
Europe; and all our oldest manuscripts show their origin by the Egyptian
form of spelling in some of the words. The Beza manuscript at Cambridge,
and the Clermont manuscript at Paris, which have Greek on one side of
the page and Latin on the other, were written in Alexandria. The Latin
is that more ancient version which was in use before the time of Jerome,
and which he corrected, to form what is now called the Latin Vulgate.
This old version was made by changing each Greek word into its
corresponding Latin word, with very little regard to the different
characters of the two languages. It was no doubt made by an Alexandrian
Greek, who had a very slight knowledge of Latin.

Already the papyrus on which books were written was, for the most part,
a manufactured article and might claim the name of paper. In the time of
Pliny in the first century the sheets had been made in the old way; the
slips of the plant laid one across the other had been held together by
their own sticky sap without the help of glue. In the reign of Aurelian,
in the third century, if not earlier, glue had been largely used in the
manufacture; and it is probable that at this time, in the fifth century,
the manufactured article almost deserved the name of paper. But this
manufactured papyrus was much weaker and less lasting than that made
after the old and more simple fashion. No books written upon it remain
to us. At a later period, the stronger fibre of flax was used in the
manufacture, but the date of this improvement is also unknown, because
at first the paper so made, like that made from the papyrus fibre, was
also too weak to last. It was doubtless an Alexandrian improvement.
Flax was an Egyptian plant; paper-making was an Egyptian trade; and
Theophilus, a Roman writer on manufactures, when speaking of paper made
from flax, clearly points to its Alexandrian origin, by giving it the
name of Greek parchment. Between the papyrus of the third century, and
the strong paper of the eleventh century, no books remain to us but
those written on parchment.

The monks of Mount Sinai suffered much during these reigns of weakness
from the marauding attacks of the Arabs. These men had no strong
monastery; but hundreds of them lived apart in single cells in the
side of the mountains round the valley of Feiran, at the foot of Mount
Serbal, and they had nothing to protect them but their poverty.
They were not protected by Egypt, and they made treaties with the
neighbouring Arabs, like an independent republic, of which the town of
Feiran was the capital. The Arabs, from the Jordan to the Red Sea,
made robbery the employment of their lives, and they added much to the
voluntary sufferings of the monks.

[Illustration: 267.jpg THE PAPYRUS PLANT]

Nilus, a monk who had left his family in Egypt, to spend his life in
prayer and study on the spot where Moses was appointed the legislator
of Israel, describes these attacks upon his brethren, and he boasts over
the Israelites that, notwithstanding their sufferings, the monks spent
their whole lives cheerfully in those very deserts which God's chosen
people could not even pass through without murmuring. Nilus has left
some letters and exhortations. It was then, probably, that the numerous
inscriptions were made on the rocks at the foot of Mount Serbal, and on
the path towards its sacred peak, which have given to one spot the name
of Mokatteb, or the valley of writing. A few of these inscriptions are
in the Greek language.

The Egyptian physicians had of old always formed a part of the
priesthood, and they seem to have done much the same after the spread
of Christianity. We find some monks named _Parabalani_, who owned
the Bishop of Alexandria as their head, and who united the offices of
physician and nurse in waiting on the sick and dying. As they professed
poverty they were maintained by the state and had other privileges; and
hence it was a place much sought after, and even by the wealthy. But to
lessen this abuse it was ordered by an imperial rescript that none but
poor people who had been rate-payers should be _Parabalani_; and their
number was limited, first to five hundred, but afterwards, at the
request of the bishop, to six hundred. A second charitable institution
in Alexandria had the care of strangers and the poor, and was also
managed by one of the priests.

Alexandria was fast sinking in wealth and population, and several new
laws were now made to lessen its difficulties. One was to add a hundred
and ten bushels of grain to the daily alimony of the city, the supply on
which the riotous citizens were fed in idleness. By a second and a third
law the five chief men in the corporation, and every man that had filled
a civic office for thirty years, were freed from all bodily punishment,
and only to be fined when convicted of a crime. Theodosius built a
large church in Alexandria, which was called after his name; and the
provincial judges were told in a letter to the prefect that, if they
wished to earn the emperor's praise, they must not only restore those
buildings which were falling through age and neglect but must also build
new ones.

Though the pagan philosophy had been much discouraged at Alexandria by
the destruction of the temples and the cessation of the sacrifices, yet
the philosophers were still allowed to teach in the schools. Syrianus
was at the head of the Platonists, and he wrote largely on the Orphic,
Pythagorean, and Platonic doctrines. In his Commentary on Aristotle's
Metaphysics he aims at showing how a Pythagorean or a Platonist would
successfully answer Aristotle's objections. He seems to look upon the
writings of Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus as the true fountains of
Platonic wisdom, quite as much as the works of the great philosopher
who gave his name to the sect. Syrianus afterwards removed to Athens, to
take charge of the Platonic school in that city, and Athens became the
chief seat of Alexandrian Platonism.

Olympiodorus was at the same time undertaking the task of forming a
Peripatetic school in Alexandria, in opposition to the new Platonism,
and he has left some of the fruits of his labour in his Commentaries on
Aristotle. But the Peripatetic philosophy was no longer attractive to
the pagans, though after the fall of the catechetical school it had
a strong following of Christian disciples. Olympiodorus also wrote
a history, but it has long since been lost, with other works of a
second-rate merit. He was a native of the Thebaid, and travelled over
his country. He described the Great Oasis as still a highly cultivated
spot, where the husbandman watered his fields every third day in summer,
and every fifth day in winter, from wells of two and three hundred feet
in depth, and thereby raised two crops of barley, and often three of
millet, in a year. Olympiodorus also travelled beyond Syene into Nubia,
with some danger from the Blemmyes, but he was not able to see the
emerald mines, which were worked on Mount Smaragdus in the Arabian
desert between Koptos and Berenice, and which seem to have been the
chief object of his journey.

Proclus came to Alexandria about the end of this reign, and studied
many years under Olympiodorus, but not to the neglect of the platonic
philosophy, of which he afterwards became such a distinguished ornament
and support. The other Alexandrians under whom Proclus studied were
Hero, the mathematician, a devout and religious pagan, Leonas, the
rhetorician, who introduced him to all the chief men of learning, and
Orion, the grammarian, who boasted of his descent from the race of
Theban priests. Thus the pagans still held up their heads in the
schools. Nor were the ceremonies of their religion, though unlawful,
wholly stopped. In the twenty-eighth year of this reign, when the people
were assembled in a theatre at Alexandria to celebrate the midnight
festival of the Nile, a sacrifice which had been forbidden by
Constantine and the council of Nicsea, the building fell beneath the
weight of the crowd, and upwards of five hundred persons were killed by
the fall.

[Illustration: 271.jpg ARABS RESTING IN THE DESERT]

It will be of some interest to review here the machinery of officers and
deputies, civil as well as military, by which Egypt was governed under
the successors of Constantine. The whole of the Eastern empire was
placed under two prefects, the pretorian prefect of the East and the
pretorian prefect of Illyricum, who, living at Constantinople, like
modern secretaries of state, made edicts for the government of the
provinces and heard the appeals. Under the prefect of the East were
fifteen consular provinces, together with Egypt, which was not any
longer under one prefect. There was no consular governor in Egypt
between the prefect at Constantinople and the six prefects of the
smaller provinces. These provinces were Upper Libya or Cyrene, Lower
Libya or the Oasis, the Thebaid, AEgyptiaca or the western part of the
Delta, Augustanica or the eastern part of the Delta, and the Heptanomis,
now named Arcadia, after the late emperor. Each of these was under
an Augustal prefect, attended by a _Princeps, a Cornicula-rius,
an Adjutor_, and others, and was assisted in civil matters by a
_Commentariensis_, a corresponding secretary, a secretary _ab actis_,
with a crowd of _numerarii_ or clerks.

The military government was under a count with two dukes, with a number
of legions, cohorts, troops, and wedges of cavalry, stationed in about
fifty cities, which, if they had looked as well in the field as they do
upon paper, would have made Theodosius II. as powerful as Augustus. But
the number of Greek and Roman troops was small. The rest were barbarians
who held their own lives at small price, and the lives of the unhappy
Egyptians at still less. The Greeks were only a part of the fifth
Macedonian legion, and Trajan's second legion, which were stationed at
Memphis, at Parembole, and at Apollinopolis; while from the names of
the other cohorts we learn that they were Franks, Portuguese, Germans,
Quadri, Spaniards, Britons, Moors, Vandals, Gauls, Sarmati, Assyrians,
Galatians, Africans, Numid-ians, and others of less known and more
remote places. Egypt itself furnished the Egyptian legion, part of which
was in Mesopotamia, Diocletian's third legion of Thebans, the first
Maximinian legion of Thebans which was stationed in Thrace, Constantine's
second Flavian legion of Thebans, Valens' second Felix legion of
Thebans, and the Julian Alexandrian legion, stationed in Thrace. Beside
these, there were several bodies of native militia, from Abydos, Syene,
and other cities, which were not formed into legions. The Egyptian
cavalry were a first and second Egyptian troop, several bodies of native
archers mounted, three troops on dromedaries, and a body of Diocletian's
third legion promoted to the cavalry. These Egyptian troops were chiefly
Arab settlers in the Thebaid, for the Kopts had long since lost the use
of arms. The Kopts were weak enough to be trampled on; but the Arabs
were worth bribing by admission into the legions. The taxes of the
province were collected by a number of counts of the sacred largesses,
who wrere under the orders of an officer of the same title at
Constantinople, and were helped by a body of counts of the exports and
imports, prefects of the treasury and of the mints, with an army
of clerks of all titles and all ranks. From this government the
Alexandrians were exempt, living under their own military prefect and
corporation, and, instead of paying any taxes beyond the custom-house
duties at the port, they received a bounty in grain out of the taxes of
Egypt.

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