History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria in the Light of Recent DiscoveryKing, L. W. (Leonard William)
History
History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria in the Light of Recent Discovery
King, L. W. (Leonard William)
Egypt -- History -- To 332 B.C.; History, Ancient
In Egypt the struggle between the adherents of Chalcedon, the “Melkites”
or Imperialists of the orthodox Greek rite, and the Eutychians or
Mono-physites, the followers of the patriarch Dioskoros, who rejected
Chalcedon, was going on with unabated fury, and was hardly stopped even
by the invasion of the pagan Persians. The last effort of the party of
Constantinople to stamp out the Monophysite heresy was made when Cyril
was patriarch and governor of Egypt. According to an ingenious theory
put forward by Mr. Butler, in his _Arab Conquest of Egypt_, it is Cyril
the patriarch who was the mysterious Mukaukas, the [Greek word], or
“Great and Magnificent One,” who played so doubtful a part in the
epoch-making events of the Arab conquest by Amr in A.D. 639-41. Usually
this Mukaukas has been regarded as a “noble Copt,” and the Copts have
generally been credited with having assisted the Islamites against
the power of Constantinople. This was a very natural and probable
conclusion, but Mr. Butler will have it that the Copts resisted the
Arabs valiantly, and that the treacherous Mukaukas was none other than
the Constantinopolitan patriarch himself.
In the papyri it is interesting to note the gradual increase of Arab
names after the conquest, more especially in those of the Archduke
Rainer ‘s collection from the Fayyûm, which was so near the new capital
city, Fustât. In Upper Egypt the change was not noticeable for a long
time, and in the great collection of Coptic _ostraka_ (inscriptions on
slips of limestone and sherds of pottery, used as a substitute for paper
or parchment), found in the ruins of the Coptic monastery established,
on the temple site of Dêr el-Bahari, we find no Arab names. These
documents, part of which have been published by Mr. W. E. Crum for the
Egypt Exploration Fund, while another part will shortly be issued for
the trustees of the British Museum by Mr. Hall, date to the seventh and
eighth centuries. Their contents resemble those of the earlier papyri
from Oxyrrhynchus, though they are not of so varied a nature and are
generally written by persons of less intelligence, i.e. the monks and
peasants of the monasteries and villages of Tjême, or Western Thebes.
During the late excavation of the XIth Dynasty temple of Dêr el-Bahari,
more of these _ostraka_ were found, which will be published for the
Egypt Exploration Fund by Messrs. Naville and Hall. Of actual buildings
of the Coptic period the most important excavations have been those of
the French School of Cairo at Bâwît, north of Asyût. This work, which
was carried on by M. Jean Clédat, has resulted in the discovery of very
important frescoes and funerary inscriptions, belonging to the monastery
of a famous martyr, St. Apollo. With these new discoveries of Christian
Egypt our work reaches its fitting close. The frontier which divides the
ancient from the modern world has almost been crossed. We look back from
the monastery of Bâwît down a long vista of new discoveries until, four
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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