At this period the population of Egypt was, like the towns that covered it, a mixture of the wrecks of several nations,--Kopts, the survivors of the ancient inhabitants of the land; Arabs, who conquered Egypt from the Kopts; and Turks, the conquerors of the Arabs. On the arrival of the French, the Kopts amounted at most to two hundred thousand: poor, despised, brutalised, they had devoted themselves, like all the proscribed classes, to the most ignoble occupations. The Arabs formed almost the entire mass of the population. Their condition was infinitely varied: some were of high birth, carrying back their pedigree to Muhammed himself; and some were landed proprietors, possessing traces of Arabian knowledge, and combining with nobility the functions of the priesthood and the magistracy, who, under the title of sheikhs, were the real aristocracy of Egypt. [Illustration: 091.jpg THE PROPHET MUHAMMED] The original of the illustration (upon the opposite page) is to be seen in a finely illuminated MS. of the ninth century, A. D., preserved in the India Office, London. The picture is of peculiar interest, being the only known portrait of Muhammed, who is evidently represented as receiving the divine command to propagate Muhammedanism. In the divans, they represented the country, when its tyrants wished to address themselves to it; in the mosques, they formed a kind of university, in which they taught the religion and the morality of the Koran, and a little philosophy and jurisprudence. The great mosque of Jemil-Azar constituted the foremost learned and religious body in the East. Next to these grandees came the smaller landholders, composing the second and more numerous class of the Arabs; then the great mass of the inhabitants, who had sunk into the state of absolute helots. These last were hired peasants or fellahs who cultivated the land, and lived in abject poverty. There was also a class of Arabs, namely, the Bedouins or rovers, who would never attach themselves to the soil, but were the children of the desert. These wandering Arabs, divided into tribes on both sides of the valley, numbered nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, and could furnish from twenty to twenty-five thousand horse. They were brave, but fit only to harass the enemy, not to fight him. The third and last race was that of the Turks; but it was not more numerous than the Kopts, amounting to about two hundred thousand souls at most, and was divided into Turks and Mamluks. The Turks were nearly all enrolled in the list of janizaries; but it is well known that they frequently had their names inscribed in those lists, that they might enjoy the privileges of janizaries, and that a very small number of them were really in the service. Very few of them composed the military force of the pasha. This pasha, sent from Constantinople, was the sultan's representative in Egypt; but, escorted by only a few janizaries, he