In 616 A.C. the Persian armies once more entered Egypt, assisted in their easy conquest by the disaffection of the Copts; at the same period they drove the Abyssinians out of western Arabia and even followed them up into eastern Abyssinia. Then the Persian power became paralysed in its turn. In 626 Heraclius sent an army into Egypt which drove out the Persians; and for a few years Egypt was fairly well governed by a Greek governor sent from Byzantium. Then once more the rule passed into ecclesiastical hands; and Kuros, the last Greek patriarch, ruled Egypt from 630 till the invasion of the Arabs, excepting for one short period of exile due to his fierce persecution of the Jacobite Copts. Cyrenaica had been practically abandoned to the Libyans after the terrible Jewish uprising and the massacre of Greek colonists in 117 A.C. Along the rest of the littoral of North Africa there were still flourishing Roman colonies and cities under Byzantine rulers or Berber chiefs, from Leptis Magna and Tripolis (Oea) on the east to Tangis (Tangier) on the west; while other Roman or Byzantine towns still persisted far inland in Tunisia and Algeria, notably Gafsa, Thala, Tebessa, and Timgad. Elsewhere, beyond the walls of the Roman cities, the Berber tribes had regained their independence and ruled over Romans and Berbers alike. At this period the great Libyan or Berber race of North Africa, which inhabited the whole region between the western frontiers of Egypt (Siwa) on the east and the Atlantic coast of Morocco on the west (practically but one language, the Libyan, being spoken throughout this vast breadth of Africa) were divided into three main branches: (1) the Berbers of the East or Libyans proper (Luata, Huara, Aurigha, Nefusa) occupying the Cyrenaica, Tripolitaine, Tunisia and a portion of eastern Algeria; (2) the Berbers of the West, or Sanhaga (Sanhaja), who peopled the Algerian coast-lands and western Algeria and all Morocco as far down as the limits of the Sahara; and (3) the Zeneta, a darker race, the descendants of the Getulians, perhaps in origin akin to the Fula, who in the 7th century A.C. peopled the more or less desert regions at the back of eastern Algeria, southern Tunis and Tripoli. From these Zeneta are descended the modern Mzab Berbers, the Wargli people, and the Beni-Merīn who founded one of the ruling dynasties of mediaeval Barbary. Several of these Zeneta dark-skinned Berber peoples pushed down to the Mediterranean coast in later times. On the other hand, many of the Eastern Berbers or Libyans were thrust back into the desert by the Arab invaders; and some of them have become the semi nomad “Tuareg” (Tawareq)[27] of to-day. Sections of the Western Berbers of the Sanhaga group also passed down into the Sahara from