THE ARAB CONQUEST OF EGYPT.*

TB E conquest of Egypt by the Arabs was no isolated event. It was part of a great movement, though it was entered upon with more distrust than any other of the early campaigns of the Muslims. Nor from the point of view of the losers can it be regarded as a thing by itself. One has to understand the whole position and policy of Heraclius before this incident in his fall can be duly appreciated. Mr. Butler has clearly grasped the essential scope of a history of this eventful period. He does not limit his view to Egypt, though this is his principal subject and the one on which he is an authority. Be looks round the horizon of the Byzantine—or, as we are now instructed to term it, the East Roman—Empire, and

• The Arab Con

Careuilou quest of Egypt. By A. J. Butler, D.Litt. Oxfora: At the

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traces with luminous insight the causes which led up to the catastrophe,—a catastrophe so far from local that it involved Syria and Asia Minor, and prepared the in- evitable way for the final overthrow on the Golden Horn.

He shows us the "agony of misrule" which tortured every limb of the Empire, and not least Egypt, where the strife between official orthodoxy and the Jacobite heresy had been embittered by Justin's severity following upon the open sympathy of Theodora. He traces the rise of the younger Heraclius, the revolt in Cyrene, the march of Nicetas on Alexandria, and the conquest of Egypt in the name of the rebel Emperor. He tells it, not from the few meagre notices of the Byzantine historians, but from the ampler narrative, only lately translated from an Ethiopic version, of John, Bishop of Nikiou in the eighth century :--

"It had been a long and desperate struggle, with a romantic ebb and flow of fortune. We have seen the country roused from its sullen torpor by the sound of Heraclius' trumpets : Nicetas capturing Alexandria almost without striking a blow, and the revolution triumphant through Egypt : then Bonasus flinging himself like a tiger on the head of the Delta, sweeping all before him to the walls of Alexandria, and dashing against the city's bulwarks only to recoil crushed and disabled for any further con- test save a guerilla warfare, which he maintained for a time with fiery courage ; then, brought to bay at last, he cheated the enemies that surrounded him of their vengeance and stole away in the night. It is a remarkable picture, drawn in strong colours, but bearing in every detail the image of reality ; it is one entirely unknown to history until revealed in the Chronicle of John of Nikiou."

In a series of dramatic scenes, which lose nothing of their effect in these eloquent pages, we witness the fall of Phocas, the horrid barbarity of his execution, and the early rule of Heraclius, seconded in Egypt by Nicetas,—where it was "an alien domination founded on force and making little pretence of sympathy with the subject race," and where differences of dogma destroyed all union between Greek and Egyptian :— " In the seventh century in Egypt the interest of politics was

quite secondary to the interest of religion and religion itself was valued rather for its requirement of intellectual assent to certain propositions than for its power to furnish the springs of moral action. Love of country was practically unknown, and national or racial antagonisms derived their acuteness mainly from their coincidence with religious differences. Men debated with fury upon shadows of shades of belief and staked their lives on the most immaterial issues, on the most subtle and intangible refinements in the formulas of theology or metaphysics."

" Numina vicinorum Odit uterque locus, cum solos credat habendos Ease deos quos ipso cot."

Things had not changed so much since Juvenal's day, though the jealous creeds had altered. It was no wonder that the Persians had an easy victory over the jarring factions in Egypt, compared with their six years' struggle in Syria, which had ended at last in the crowning triumph of the capture of Jerusalem. The Empire of Heraclius now scarcely stretched out of sight of Constantinople. The Persians were actually planted at Chalcedon on the Bosporus, and hordes of Huns harried the European side. Nothing more wonderful in the annals of the Lower Empire can be read than the swift recovery of all these losses by the brilliant energy of the Emperor. In 628 Egypt had already been restored to him, he had actually pressed beyond Ctesiphon, and Jerusalem was delivered and the Holy Rood brought safely to St. Sophia, to

be restored in the following year with solemn pomp to the Holy City, in the great feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. But the triumph was followed by a second and overwhelming downfall. Eight years later Jerusalem was in the hands of the followers of that uncouth Arabian prophet who rose to prominence at the very moment when Heraclius was in his zenith. In 642 Alexandria capitulated ; but the great Emperor—supreme in his greatness, and equally colossal in his failure—was already no more. He had driven back a " heathen " creed, only to see his Empire overwhelmed by the religion of the One God.

From this point we follow the separate history of the Egyptian conquest with but occasional reference to Constanti- nople or Syria. Yet the three are closely linked. But for the crushing defeats in Syria and his consequent despair, Heraclius would have shown more fight in Egypt; and but for the unhappy resolve to impose the Byzantine compromise, the monothelite definition, upon a nation which was deeply attached, with a devotion only equalled by dimness of com- prehension, to the monophysite formula, it is just possible that

Egypt might have offered a united front to the invaders. At the same time, it must be admitted that, so far as history teaches us, the Egyptians never have presented a formidable obstacle to conquest; they have been under a series of foreign rulers, as they are still, and we are not sure that they have not generally welcomed the conquerors as an agreeable change. Certainly they made no resistance to Amr and his Arabs in 640. The Roman garrison fought many battles, but we do not hear of a single Coptic defender of the country. Mr. Butler is anxious to show that the Copts did not take the Muslim side, as they are usually represented to have done ; but he fails to convince us. That they did not fight on that side is evident, but that is no new feature in Coptic history. That they were delighted to get rid of what they called the " Chalcedonian " rule is no less evident from Mr. Butler's own work. It may have been a case of the frying-pan, but the Copts did not care what fire they fell into provided " Chal- cedon " were wiped out. Only the apathy or treachery of the Copts, joined to the general paralysis of the Roman power following upon the reverses in Syria, seems to account for the success of the small force of Muslims in Egypt ; for they entered only four thousand strong, and appear never to have mustered more than twelve thousand, or at the utmost fifteen thousand men, and could not compare in training or arms with the Romans. Mr. Butler, however, finds another cause in the deliberate treachery of Cyrus, the Melkite Patriarch of Alex- andria, who, according to this theory, threw in his lot with the Arabs in the hope of attaining complete independence of Im- perial control. By a series of shrewd deductions from a number of instances in which the same political acts are ascribed by different authorities respectively to the Patriarch and to the mysterious "governor of Egypt" whom the Arabs call "the Mukaukas," and who undoubtedly negotiated the capitulation to the Muslims, Mr. Butler proves to his own complete satisfac- tion that Cyrus and the Mukaukas are the same person, and that the surrender to the Arabs was part of the Patriarch's ambitious scheme.

In less than two years the whole country was reduced to the position of a province of the Medina Khalifate. That it was not done without hard fighting Mr. Butler's minute analysis of the campaigns, in which his knowledge of the country serves him in good stead, amply proves. The siege of Babylon—the fortress which still stands near Cairo—no easy operation with the limited engineering experience of the Arabs, delayed him seven months, and that Alexandria surrendered almost with- out a blow struck was more the result of faction than of Muslim tactics. There was no siege of Alexandria, nor, it appears, was there any burning of the famous "Alexandrian library," for our author devotes a very interesting chapter to showing that the legend of its destruction does not make its first appearance till five centuries after the supposed act of vandalism, and, moreover, involves a tissue of absurdities ; that the principal actor in the story, John Philoponus, was dead long before the conquest; that the Museum Library perished probably in Julius Caesar's conflagration, or, at all events, not less than four centuries before the coming of the Arabs, and the other great library, that of the Serapeum, disappeared at the end of the fourth century ; that no library is mentioned by any one in the fifth, sixth, and early seventh centuries; that even if it bad existed, the Romans had eleven months' armistice during which the library could have been removed to safety ; and that if it had been either removed or destroyed the almost contemporary scholar and historian, John of Nikiou, could not have failed to mention the fact. The whole narrative of the conquest shows that the Arabs treated the people and their religious sentiments with remarkable con- sideration.

There is so much that is scholarly and learned in this ex- tremely valuable work that it would perhaps be ungracious to refer to the very few minor errors which disfigure its pages but for the conviction that the author will be glad to correct them in future editions. Mr. Butler does not always quote the titles of books correctly. He has used De Goeje's series of Arab geographers, so he must surely know that its title is not Bibliotheca Geographica Arabica. MacGuckin de Slane's trans- lation of Dm Khallikiin is not "in French," but in English. White's edition of Abd-Al-Latif should never be cited when de . Secy.'s annotated translation is at hand. Baldwin I. certainly was not at Pelusium "in 1515-6 A.D." " Anas-

tasius" for Athanasitus is an obvious slip of the pen ; and " Anf " for Auf a misprint; but " "17mm DAnain," " jiziah," "yam," " mfadiriah," " Bosrah," " Ibn al Hajar," are mistakes. In a book abounding in Oriental words, however, it is remarkable how accurate the printing is.