Either in this year or in 405 Hakim made very strict rules about women. He forbade them to go about the streets at all. The baths used by women were closed; boot-makers were forbidden to make outdoor boots for women, and so some of the boot-makers’ shops were closed entirely. Women were forbidden to look out of doors or windows, or to go out on terraces. These laws continued in force until the close of the reign. A case occurred in which some old women who lived by spinning and selling their work to the merchants were neither able to dispose of it to their customers nor go out to buy provisions, and remained inside until their bodies, which showed that they had died of starvation, were found by the neighbours. When this was reported to the Khalif he conceded that merchants who bought or sold with women might go to the doors of their houses and the women might pass out goods or money and receive its exchange, provided they did not show their faces or hands to the merchant or any passer-by in the street. One day Hakim was passing the “Golden Baths” and heard a great deal of noise within. On making enquiry he found that there were women inside. He ordered the doors and windows to be walled up and left the inmates to perish of hunger. The pretext given for these new regulations was the libertinage of the Egyptian women. Hakim employed many harim spies, and by means of these old women he heard of various assignations and intrigues. On several occasions he sent a eunuch with a guard of soldiers to wait in concealment at the place of assignation, and when the woman appeared had her seized and thrown into the Nile. On other occasions he sent guards to private houses to demand by name women whose conduct had been unfavourably reported, and they were disposed of in the same manner. It seems almost impossible to excuse Hakim’s conduct at this period by the supposition that he was an earnest but fanatical puritan: the frequency of new regulations, the constant changes in so many details, and the capricious character of his conduct all tend to make the theory of so many contemporaries that he was insane the more plausible. In Syria the prestige of Egypt increased. Mansur, the son of Luʿluʿ at Aleppo, had to ask Hakim’s help against Abu l-Hayja, the grandson of Sayf ad-Dawla, and this was given. In Ramadan of this year (404) Hakim issued a charter granting to Mansur Aleppo and its dependencies which were thus held as tributary to Egypt.