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

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Such was the new law which Justinian, the great Roman lawgiver, proposed
for the future government of Egypt. The Egyptians were treated as
slaves, whose duty was to raise grain for the use of their masters at
Constantinople, and their taskmasters at Alexandria. They did not even
receive from the government the usual benefit of protection from their
enemies, and they felt bound to the emperor by no tie either of love
or interest. The imperial orders wrere very little obeyed beyond those
places where the troops were encamped; the Arabs were each year pressing
closer upon the valley of the Nile, and helping the sands of the desert
to defeat the labours of the disheartened husbandmen; and the Greek
language, which had hitherto followed and marked the route of commerce
from Alexandria to Syene, and to the island of Socotra, was now but
seldom heard in Upper Egypt. The Alexandrians were sorely harassed by
Haephasstus, a lawyer, who had risen by court favour to the chief post
in the city. He made monopolies in his own favour of all the necessaries
of life, and secured his ill-gotten gains by ready loans of part of
it to Justinian. His zeal for the emperor was at the cost of the
Alexandrians, and to save the public granaries he lessened the supply
of grain which the citizens looked for as a right. The city was sinking
fast; and the citizens could ill bear this loss, for its population,
though lessened, was still too large for the fallen state of Egypt.

The grain of the merchants was shipped from Alexandria to the chief
ports of Europe, between Constantinople in the east and Cornwall in the
west. Britain had been left by the Romans, as too remote for them to
hold in their weakened condition; and the native Britons were then
struggling against their Saxon invaders, as in a distant corner of the
world, beyond the knowledge of the historian. But to that remote country
the Alexandrian merchants sailed every year with grain to purchase tin,
enlightening the natives, while they only meant to enrich themselves.
Under the most favourable circumstances they sometimes performed the
voyage in twenty days. The wheat was sold in Cornwall at the price of a
bushel for a piece of silver, perhaps worth about twenty cents, or for
the same weight of tin, as the tin and the silver were nearly of equal
worth. This was the longest of the ancient voyages, being longer than
that from the Red Sea to the island of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean; and
it had been regularly performed for at least eight centuries without
ever teaching the British to venture so far from their native shores.

The suffering and riotous citizens made Alexandria a very unpleasant
place of abode for the prefect and magistrates. They therefore built
palaces and baths for their own use, at the public cost, at Taposiris,
about a day's journey to the west of the city, at a spot yet marked
by the remains of thirty-six marble columns, and a lofty tower, once
perhaps a lighthouse. At the same time it became necessary to fortify
the public granaries against the rebellious mob. The grain was brought
from the Nile by barges on a canal to the village of Chaereum, and
thence to a part of Alexandria named Phialae, or _The Basins_, where the
public granaries stood. In all riots and rebellions this place had been
a natural point of attack; and often had the starving mob broken
open these buildings, and seized the grain that was on its way to
Constantinople. But Justinian surrounded them with a strong wall
against such attacks for the future, and at the same time he rebuilt the
aqueduct that had been destroyed in one of the sieges of the city.

In civil suits at law an appeal had always been allowed from the prefect
of the province to the emperor, or rather to the prefect of the East
at Constantinople; but as this was of course expensive, it was found
necessary to forbid it when the sum of money in dispute was small.
Justinian forbade all Egyptian appeals for sums less than ten pounds
weight of gold, or about two thousand five hundred dollars; for smaller
sums the judgment of the prefect was to be final, lest the expense
should swallow up the amount in dispute.

In this reign the Alexandrians, for the first time within the records
of history, felt the shock of an earthquake. Their naturalists had very
fairly supposed that the loose alluvial nature of the soil of the Delta
was the reason why earthquakes were unknown in Lower Egypt, and believed
that it would always save them from a misfortune which often overthrew
cities in other countries. Pliny thought that Egypt had been always free
from earthquakes. But this shock was felt by everybody in the city;
and Agathias, the Byzantine historian, who, after reading law in the
university of Beirut, was finishing his studies at Alexandria, says that
it was strong enough to make the inhabitants all run into the street for
fear the houses should fall upon them.

The reign of Justinian is remarkable for another blow then given to
paganism throughout the empire, or at least through those parts of the
empire where the emperor's laws were obeyed.

[Illustration: 313.jpg A MODERN HOUSE IN THE DELTA AT ROSETTA]

Under Justinian the pagan schools were again and from that time forward
closed. Isidorus the platonist and Salustius the Cynic were among the
learned men of greatest note who then withdrew from Alexandria. Isidorus
had been chosen by Marinus as his successor in the platonic chair at
Athens, to fill the high post of the platonic successor; but he had left
the Athenian school to Zenodotus, a pupil of Proclus, and had removed
to Alexandria. Salustius the Cynic was a Syrian, who had removed with
Isidorus from Athens to Alexandria. He was virtuous in his morals though
jocular in his manners, and as ready in his witty attacks upon the
speculative opinions of his brother philosophers as upon the vices of
the Alexandrians. These learned men, with Damascius and others from
Athens, were kindly received by the Persians, who soon afterwards, when
they made a treaty of peace with Justinian, generously bargained that
these men, the last teachers of paganism, should be allowed to return
home, and pass the rest of their days in quiet.

After the flight of the pagan philosophers, but little learning was left
in Alexandria. One of the most remarkable men in this age of ignorance
was Cosmas, an Alexandrian merchant, who wished that the world should
not only be enriched but enlightened by his travels. After making many
voyages through Ethiopia to India for the sake of gain, he gave up trade
and became a monk and an author. When he writes as a traveller about the
Christian churches of India and Ceylon, and the inscriptions which he
copied at Adule in Abyssinia, everything that he tells us is valuable;
but when he reasons as a monk, the case is sadly changed. He is of the
dogmatical school which forbids all inquiry as heretical. He fights
the battle which has been so often fought before and since, and is even
still fought so resolutely, the battle of religious ignorance against
scientific knowledge. He sets the words of the Bible against the results
of science; he denies that the world is a sphere, and quotes the Old
Testament against the pagan astronomers, to show that it is a plane,
covered by the firmament as by a roof, above which he places the kingdom
of heaven. His work is named _Christian Topography_, and he is himself
usually called Cosmas Indicopleustes, from the country which he visited.

During the latter years of the government of Apollinarius, such was
his unpopularity as a spiritual bishop that both the rival parties, the
Gaianites and the Theodosians, had been building places of worship for
themselves, and the more zealous Jacobites had quietly left the churches
to Apollinarius and the Royalists. But on the death of an archdeacon
they again came to blows with the bishop; and a monk had his beard torn
off his chin by the Gaianites in the streets of Alexandria. The emperor
was obliged to interfere, and he sent the Abbot Photinus to Egypt to put
down this rebellion, and heal the quarrel in the Church. Apollinarius
died soon afterwards, and Justinian then appointed John to the joint
office of prefect of the city and patriarch of the Church. The new
archbishop was accused of being a Manichean; but this seems to mean
nothing but that he was too much of the Egyptian party, and that,
though he was the imperial patriarch, and not acknowledged by the Koptic
church, yet his opinions were disliked by the Greeks. On his death,
which happened in about three years, they chose Peter, who held the
Jacobite or Egyptian opinions, and whose name is not mentioned in the
Greek lists of the patriarchs. Peter's death occurred in the same year
as that of the emperor.

Under Justinian we again find some small traces of a national coinage in
Egypt. Ever since the reign of Diocletian, the old Egyptian coinage had
been stopped, and the Alexandrians had used money of the same weight,
and with the same Latin inscriptions, as the rest of the empire. But
under Justinian, though the inscriptions on the coins are still Latin,
they have the name of the city in Greek letters. Like the coins of
Constantinople, they have a cross, the emblem of Christianity; but while
the other coins of the empire have the Greek numeral letters, E, I, K,
A, or M, to denote the value, meaning 5, 10, 20, 30, or 40, the coins
of Alexandria have the letters 1 B for 12, showing that they were on a
different system of weights from those of Constantinople. On these the
head of the emperor is in profile. But later in his reign the style was
changed, the coins were made larger, and the head of the emperor had a
front face. On these larger coins the numeral letters are [A r] for 33.
We thus learn that the Alexandrians at this time paid and received
money rather by weight than by tale, and avoided all depreciation of the
currency. As the early coins marked 12 had become lighter by wear, those
which were meant to be of about three times their value were marked 33.

During the period from 566 to 602 Justin II. reigned twelve years,
Tiberius reigned four years, and Mauricius, his son-in-law, twenty; and
under these sovereigns the empire gained a little rest from its enemies
by a rebellion among the Persians, which at last overthrew their king
Chosroes. He fled to Mauricius for help, and was by him restored to his
throne, after which the two kingdoms remained at peace to the end of his
reign.

[Illustration: 316.jpg COINS OF JUSTINIAN]

The Emperor Mauricius was murdered by Phocas, who, in 602, succeeded
him on the throne of Constantinople. No sooner did the news of his death
reach Persia than Chosroes, the son of Hormuz, who had married Maria,
the daughter of Mauricius, declared the treaty with the Romans at an
end, and moved his forces against the new emperor, the murderer of his
father-in-law. During the whole of his reign Constantinople was kept in
a state of alarm and almost of siege by the Persians; and the crimes and
misfortunes of Phocas alike prepared his subjects for a revolt. In the
seventh year Alexandria rebelled in favour of the young Heraclius, son
of the late prefect of Cyrene; and the patriarch of Egypt was slain
in the struggle. Soon afterwards Heraclius entered the port of
Constantinople with his fleet, and Phocas was put to death after an
unfortunate reign of eight years, in which he had lost every province of
the empire.

During the first three years of the reign of Heraclius, Theodoras was
Bishop of Alexandria; but upon his death the wishes of the Alexandrians
so strongly pointed to John, the son of the prefect of Cyprus, that
the emperor, yielding to their request, appointed him to the bishopric.
Alexandria was not a place in which a good man could enjoy the pleasures
of power without feeling the weight of its duties. It was then suffering
under all those evils which usually befall the capital of a sinking
state. It had lost much of its trade, and its poorer citizens no longer
received a free supply of grain. The unsettled state of the country
was starving the larger cities, and the population of Alexandria was
suffering from want of employment. The civil magistrates had removed
their palace to a distance. But the new bishop seemed formed for these
unfortunate times, and, though appointed by the emperor, he was in every
respect worthy of the free choice of the citizens. He was foremost in
every work of benevolence and charity. The five years of his government
were spent in lightening the sufferings of the people, and he gained the
truly Christian name of John the Almsgiver. Beside his private acts of
kindness he established throughout the city hospitals for the sick and
almshouses for the poor and for strangers, and as many as seven lying-in
hospitals for poor women. John was not less active in outrooting all
that he thought heresy.

The first years of the reign of Heraclius are chiefly marked by the
successes of the Persians. While Chosroes, their king, was himself
attacking Constantinople, one general was besieging Jerusalem and a
second overrunning Lower Egypt. Crowds fled before the invading army
to Alexandria as a place of safety, and the famine increased as the
province of the prefect grew narrower and the population more crowded.
To add to the distress the Nile rose to a less height than usual; the
seasons seemed to assist the enemy in the destruction of Egypt. The
patriarch John, who had been sending money, grain, and Egyptian workmen
to assist in the pious work of rebuilding the church of Jerusalem which
the Persians had destroyed, immediately found all his means needed, and
far from enough, for the poor of Alexandria. On his appointment to the
bishopric he found in its treasury eight thousand pounds of gold; he
had in the course of five years received ten thousand more from the
offerings of the pious, as his princely ecclesiastical revenue was
named; but this large sum of four million dollars had all been spent
in deeds of generosity or charity, and the bishop had no resource but
borrowing to relieve the misery with which he was surrounded. In the
fifth year the unbelievers were masters of Jerusalem, and in the eighth
they entered Alexandria, and soon held all the Delta; and in that
year the grain which had hitherto been given to the citizens of
Constantinople was sold to them at a small price, and before the end of
the year the supply from Egypt was wholly stopped.

When the Persians entered Egypt, the patrician Nicetas, having no
forces with which he could withstand their advance, and knowing that no
succour was to be looked for from Constantinople, and finding that the
Alexandrians were unwilling to support him, fled with the patriarch John
the Almsgiver to Cyprus, and left the province to the enemy. As John
denied that the Son of God had suffered on the cross, his opinions would
seem not to have been very unlike those of the Egyptians; but as he was
appointed to the bishopric by the emperor, though at the request of the
people, he is not counted among the patriarchs of the Koptic church;
and one of the first acts of the Persians was to appoint Benjamin, a
Jacobite priest, who already performed the spiritual office of Bishop of
Alexandria, to the public exercise of that duty, and to the enjoyment of
the civil dignity and revenues.

The troops with which Chosroes conquered and held Egypt were no doubt in
part Syrians and Arabs, people with whom the fellahs or labouring class
of Egyptians were closely allied in blood and feelings. Hence arose the
readiness with which the whole country yielded when the Roman forces
were defeated. But hence also arose the weakness of the Persians, and
their speedy loss of this conquest when the Arabs rebelled. Their rule,
however, in Egypt was not quite unmarked in the history of these dark
ages.

At this time Thomas, a Syrian bishop, came to Alexandria to correct the
Syriac version of the New Testament, which had been made about a century
before by Philoxenus. He compared the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles with
the Greek manuscripts in the monastery of St. Anthony in the capital;
and we still possess the fruits of his learned labour, in which he
altered the ancient text to make it agree with the newer Alexandrian
manuscripts. From his copy the Philoxenian version is now printed. A
Syriac manuscript of the New Testament written by Alexandrian penmen
in the sixth year of Heraclius, is now to be seen in the library of the
Augustan friars in Rome. At the same time another Syrian scholar, Paul
of Tela, in Mesopotamia, was busy in the Alexandrian monastery of
St. Zacchaeus in translating the Old Testament into Syriac, from the
Septuagint Greek; and he closes his labours with begging the reader to
pray for the soul of his friend Thomas. Such was now the reputation of
the Alexandrian edition of the Bible, that these scholars preferred it
both to the original Hebrew of the Old and to the earlier manuscripts
of the New Testament. Among other works of this time were the medical
writings of Aaron the physician of Alexandria, formerly written in
Syriac, and afterwards much valued by the Arabs. The Syrian monks in
numbers settled in the monastery of Mount Nitria; and in that secluded
spot there remained a colony of these monks for several centuries,
kept up by the occasional arrival of newcomers from the churches on the
eastern side of the Euphrates.

For ten years the Egyptians were governed by the Persians, and had
a patriarch of their own religion and of their own choice; and the
building of the Persian palace in Alexandria proves how quietly they
lived under their new masters. But Heraclius was not idle under his
misfortunes. The Persians had been weakened by the great revolt of the
Arabs, who had formed their chief strength on the side of Constantinople
and Egypt; and Heraclius, leading his forces bravely against Chosroes,
drove him back from Syria and became in his turn the invader, and he
then recovered Egypt. The Jacobite patriarch Benjamin fled with the
Persians; and Heraclius appointed George to the bishopric, which was
declared to have been empty since John the Almsgiver fled to Cyprus.

The revolt of the Arabs, which overthrew the power of the Persians in
their western provinces and for a time restored Egypt to Constantinople,
was the foundation of the mighty empire of the caliphs; and the Hegira,
or flight of Muhammed, from which the Arabic historians count their
lunar years, took place in 622, the twelfth year of Heraclius. The
vigour of the Arab arms rapidly broke the Persian yoke, and the Moslems
then overran every province in the neighbourhood. This was soon felt
by the Romans, who found the Arabs, even in the third year of their
freedom, a more formidable enemy than the Persians whom they had
overthrown; and, after a short struggle of only two years, Heraclius
was forced to pay a tribute to the Moslems for their forbearance in
not conquering Egypt. For eight years he was willing to purchase an
inglorious peace by paying tribute to the caliph; but when his treasure
failed him and the payment was discontinued, the Arabs marched against
the nearest provinces of the empire, offering to the inhabitants their
choice of either paying tribute or receiving the Muhammedan religion;
and they then began on their western frontier that rapid career of
conquest which they had already begun on the eastern frontier against
their late masters, the Persians.

[Illustration: 322.jpg TAILPIECE]

CHAPTER III.--EGYPT DURING THE MUHAMMEDAN PERIOD

_The Rise of Muhammedanism: The Arabic Conquest of Egypt: The Ommayad
and Abbasid Dynasties._

The course of history now follows the somewhat uneventful period
which introduced Arabian rule into the valley of the Nile. It is only
necessary to remind the reader of the striking incidents in the life of
Muhammed. He was born at Mecca, in Arabia, in July, 571, and spent his
earliest years in the desert. At the age of twelve he travelled with a
caravan to Syria, and probably on this occasion first came into contact
with the Jews and Christians. After a few youthful adventures, his
poetic and religious feelings were awakened by study. He gave himself
up to profound meditation upon both the Jewish and Christian ideals, and
subsequently beholding the archangel Gabriel in a vision, he proclaimed
himself as a prophet of God. After preaching his doctrine for three
years, and gaining a few converts (the first of whom was his wife,
Khadija), the people of Mecca rose against him and he was forced to
flee from the city in 614. New visions and subsequent conversions of
influential Arabs strengthened his cause, especially in Medina, whither
Muhammed was forced to flee a second time from Mecca in 622, this second
flight being known as the Hegira, from which dates the Muhammedan era.
In the next year, at Medina, he built his first mosque and married
Ayesha, and in 624 was compelled to defend his pretensions by an appeal
to arms. He was at first successful, and thereupon appointed Friday as
a day of public worship, and, being embittered against the Jews, ordered
that the attitude of prayer should no longer be towards Jerusalem, but
towards his birthplace, Mecca. In 625 the Muhammedans were defeated by
the Meccans, but one tribe after another submitted to him, and after a
series of victories Muhammed prepared, in 629, for further conquests
in Syria, but he died in 632 before they could be accomplished. His
successors were known as caliphs, but from the very first his disciples
quarrelled about the leadership, some affirming the rights of Ali,
who had married Muhammed's daughter, Fatima, and others supporting
the claims of Abu Bekr, his father-in-law. There was also a religious
quarrel concerning certain oral traditions relating to the Koran, or
the Muhammedan sacred scriptures. Those who accepted the tradition were
known as Sunnites, and those who rejected it as Shiites, the latter
being the supporters of Ali, both sects, however, being known as Moslems
or Islamites. Omar, a Sunnite, obtained the leadership in 634, and
proceeded to carry out the prophet's ambitious schemes of conquest.
He subdued successively Syria, Palestine, and Phoenicia, and in 639
directed operations against Egypt. The general in charge of this
expedition was Amr, who led four thousand men against Pelusium, which
surrendered after a siege of thirty days. This easy victory was crowned
by the capture of Alexandria. Amr entered the city on December 22, 640,
and he seems to have been surprised at his own success. He immediately
wrote to the caliph a letter in which he says:

"I have conquered the town of the West, and I cannot recount all it
contains within its walls. It contains four thousand baths and twelve
thousand venders of green vegetables, four thousand Jews who pay
tribute, and four thousand musicians and mountebanks."

Amr was anxious to conciliate and gain the affection of the new subjects
he had added to the caliph's empire, and during his short stay in
Alexandria received them with kindness and personally heard and attended
to their demands. It is commonly believed that in this period the
Alexandrian Library was dismantled; but, as we have already seen, the
books had been destroyed by the zeal of contending Christians. The story
that attributes the destruction of this world-famous institution to
the Arabian conquerors is so much a part of history, and has been so
generally accepted as correct, that the traditional version should be
given here.

Among the inhabitants of Alexandria whom Amr had so well received, says
the monkish chronicler, was one John the Grammarian, a learned
Greek, disciple of the Jacobite sect, who had been imprisoned by its
persecutors. Since his disgrace, he had given himself up entirely to
study, and was one of the most assiduous readers in the famous library.
With the change of masters he believed the rich treasure would be
speedily dispersed, and he wished to obtain a portion of it himself. So,
profiting by the special kindness Amr had shown him, and the pleasure he
appeared to take in his conversation, he ventured to ask for the gift of
several of the philosophic books whose removal would put an end to his
learned researches.

At first Amr granted this request without hesitation, but in his
gratitude John the Grammarian expatiated so unwisely on the extreme
rarity of the manuscripts and their inestimable value, that Amr, on
reflection, feared he had overstepped his power in granting the learned
man's request. "I will refer the matter to the caliph," he said,
and thereupon wrote immediately to Omar and asked the caliph for
his commands concerning the disposition of the whole of the precious
contents of the library.

The caliph's answer came quickly. "If," he wrote, "the books contain
only what is in the book of God (the Koran), it is enough for us, and
these books are useless. If they contain anything contrary to the holy
book, they are pernicious. In any case, burn them."

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