Egypt
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
Feluccas on the Nile River, near Luxor in Upper Egypt.
Robert Frerck/Odyssey Productions
officially Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic Misr or Jumhuriyah Misr al-'Arabiyah country located in the northeastern corner of Africa. It has a total area of about 385,230 square miles (997,740 square kilometres). Its land frontiers border Libya in the west, The Sudan in the south, and Israel in the northeast. (Israeli forces occupied the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip in eastern Egypt after the Arab–Israeli War of 1967. In 1982 the Sinai was returned to Egypt.) In the north its Mediterranean coastline is about 620 miles (1,000 kilometres), and in the east its coastline on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba is about 1,200 miles. The capital is Cairo.
Egypt was the home of one of the principal civilizations of the ancient Middle East and, like Mesopotamia, of one of the very earliest urban and literate societies. Its culture had an important influence on both ancient Israel and ancient Greece, which in turn helped to form the civilization of the modern West. Egypt also provided Africa with its earliest civilization and may well have had considerable influence on the development of other African cultures.
The special character evident in the civilization of ancient Egypt over a period of 3,000 years developed very rapidly at the time when the country first achieved unity. This great event happened in about 3100 BC, and, while some of the seeds of Egyptian culture had sprouted before this time, it is proper to regard the start of the 1st dynasty as the virtual beginning of Egypt as the country and its civilization are now generally envisaged.
Perhaps the first and most important quality that typified this civilization was continuity. In every aspect of Egyptian life, in every manifestation of its culture, a deep conservatism can be observed. This clinging to the traditions and ways of earlier generations was the particular strength of the Egyptians. It can also be regarded as a weakness; but for a relatively primitive culture there was more to be gained than lost in attachment to the past. Regularity was a built-in characteristic of Egypt; life in the Nile Valley was determined to a great extent by the behaviour of the river itself. The pattern of inundation and falling water, of high Nile and low Nile, established the Egyptian year and controlled the lives of the Egyptian farmers—and most Egyptians were tied to a life on the land—from birth to death, from century to century. On the regular behaviour of the Nile rested the prosperity, the very continuity, of the land. The three seasons of the Egyptian year were even named after the land conditions produced by the river; akhet, the “inundation”; peret, the season when the land emerged from the flood; and shomu, the time when water was short. When the Nile behaved as expected, which most commonly was the case, life went on as normal; when the flood failed or was excessive, disaster followed.
Egypt has always been a hub for routes—westward along the coast of North Africa, northwest to Europe, northeast to the Levant, south along the Nile to Africa, and southeast to the Indian Ocean and the Far East. This natural advantage was enhanced in 1869 by the opening of the Suez Canal, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea. The concern of the European powers to safeguard the Suez Canal for strategic and commercial reasons has probably been the most important single factor influencing the history of Egypt since the 19th century. During the Cold War, for example, the increasing presence of the United States and the Soviet Union in the Mediterranean kept Egypt in the international spotlight. Egypt's traditional significance to the balance of power, however, also lay in its location in Africa and along the Red Sea passage to the Indian Ocean. Both during and after the Cold War, Egypt's central role in the Arabic-speaking world increased its geopolitical importance as Arab nationalism and inter-Arab relations became powerful and emotional political forces in the Middle East and North Africa.
The land
Relief
Al-Qasr, Egypt, in the oasis of ad-Dakhilah in the Western Desert.
© Georg Gerster—Photo Researchers, Inc.
The topography of Egypt is dominated by the Nile. For about 750 miles of its northward course through the country, the river cuts its way through bare desert, its narrow valley a sharply delineated strip of green, abundantly fecund in contrast to the desolation that surrounds it. From Lake Nasser, the river's entrance into southern Egypt, to Cairo in the north, the Nile is hemmed into its trenchlike valley by bordering cliffs, but at Cairo these disappear, and the river begins to fan out into its delta. As many as seven branches of the river once flowed through the Delta, but its waters are now concentrated in two, the Damietta Branch to the east and the Rosetta Branch to the west. Though totally flat apart from an occasional mound projecting through the alluvium, the Delta is far from featureless; it is crisscrossed by a maze of canals and drainage channels.
The Nile divides the desert plateau through which it flows into two unequal sections—the Western Desert (Arabic as-Sahra' al-Gharbiyah), between the river and the Libyan frontier; and the Eastern Desert (Arabic as-Sahra' ash-Sharqiyah), extending to the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, and the Red Sea. Each of them has its own character, as does the third and smallest of the Egyptian deserts, the Sinai. The Western (Libyan) Desert is arid and without wadis (dry beds of seasonal rivers), while the Eastern Desert is extensively dissected by wadis and fringed by rugged mountains in the east. The desert of central Sinai is open country, broken by isolated hills and scored by wadis.
Egypt is not, as is often believed, an unrelievedly flat country. Mountainous areas occur in the extreme southwest of the Western Desert, along the Red Sea coast, and in southern Sinai. The high ground in the southwest is associated with the 'Uwaynat mountain mass, which lies just outside Egyptian territory. A number of peaks in the Red Sea Hills (Itbay) rise to more than 6,000 feet (1,800 metres), and the highest, Mount Shaiyb al-Banat, reaches 7,175 feet (2,187 metres). The sharply serrated crests of the mountains of southern Sinai reach elevations of more than 8,000 feet; among them is Mount Catherine (Jabal Katrina), Egypt's highest mountain, which has an elevation of 8,668 feet (2,642 metres).
The coastal regions of Egypt, with the exception of the Delta, are everywhere hemmed in either by desert or by mountain; they are arid or of very limited fertility. The coastal plain, in both the north and east, tends to be narrow; it seldom exceeds a width of 30 miles. With the exception of the cities of Alexandria, Port Said, and Suez and a few small ports and resorts, the coastal regions are sparsely populated and underdeveloped.
Drainage and soils
Apart from the Nile, the only natural perennial surface drainage consists of a few small streams in the mountains of southern Sinai. Most of the valleys of the Eastern Desert drain westward to the Nile. They are eroded by water but normally dry; only after heavy rainstorms in the Red Sea Hills do they carry torrents. The shorter valleys on the eastern flank of the Red Sea Hills drain toward the Red Sea; they, too, are normally dry. Drainage in the Sinai mountains is toward the gulfs of Suez and Aqaba; as in the Red Sea Hills, torrent action has produced valleys that are deeply eroded and normally dry.
The central plateau of Sinai drains northward toward Wadi al-'Arish, a depression in the desert that occasionally carries surface water. One of the features of the Western Desert is its aridity, as shown by the absence of drainage lines. There is, however, an extensive water table beneath the Western Desert. Where the water table comes near the surface it has been tapped by wells in some oases.
Outside the areas of Nile silt deposits, the nature of such cultivable soil as exists depends upon the availability of the water supply and the type of rock in the area. Almost one-third of the total land surface of Egypt consists of Nubian sandstone, which extends over the southern sections of both the Eastern and Western deserts. Limestone deposits of the Eocene Epoch (from 38,000,000 to 54,000,000 years old) cover a further one-fifth of the land surface, including central Sinai and the central portions of both the Eastern and Western deserts. The northern part of the Western Desert consists of Miocene limestone (from 7,000,000 to 26,000,000 years old). About one-eighth of the total area, notably the mountains of Sinai, the Red Sea, and the southwest part of the Western Desert, consists of ancient igneous and metamorphic rocks.
The Nile River at Aswan, Egypt.
Erika Stone/Photo Researchers
The silt, which constitutes the present-day cultivated land in the Delta and the Nile Valley, has been carried down from the Ethiopian Highlands by the Nile's upper tributary system, consisting of the Blue Nile and the 'Atbarah rivers. The depth of the deposits ranges from more than 30 feet in the northern Delta to about 22 feet at Aswan. The White Nile, which is joined by the Blue Nile at Khartoum, in The Sudan, supplies important chemical constituents. The composition of the soil varies and is generally more sandy toward the edges of the cultivated area. A high clay content makes it difficult to work, and a concentration of sodium carbonate sometimes produces infertile black-alkali soils. In the north of the Delta, salinization has produced the sterile soils of the so-called barari (“barren”) regions.
Climate
Egypt lies within the North African desert belt; its general climatic characteristics, therefore, are low annual rainfall and a considerable seasonal and diurnal (daily) temperature range, with sunshine occurring throughout the year. In the desert, cyclones stir up sand or dust storms, called khamsins, which occur most frequently from March to June; these are caused by tropical air from the south that moves northward as a result of the extension northeastward of the low-pressure system of The Sudan. A khamsin is accompanied by a sharp increase in temperature of 14 to 20 °F (8 to 11 °C), a drop in relative humidity (often to 10 percent), and thick dust; it can reach gale force.
The climate is basically biseasonal, with winter lasting from November to March and summer from May to September, with short transitional periods intervening. The winters are cool and mild, and the summers are hot. Mean January minimum and maximum temperatures show a variation between 48 and 65 °F (9 and 18 °C) in Alexandria and 48 and 74 °F (9 and 23 °C) at Aswan. The summer months are hot throughout the country, with mean midday June maximum temperatures ranging from 91 °F (33 °C) at Cairo to 106 °F (41 °C) at Aswan. Egypt enjoys a very sunny climate, with some 12 hours of sunshine per day in the summer months and between eight and 10 hours per day in winter. Extremes of temperature can occur, and prolonged winter cold spells or summer heat waves are not uncommon.
Humidity diminishes noticeably from north to south and on the desert fringes. Along the Mediterranean coast the humidity is high throughout the year, but it is highest in summer. When high humidity levels coincide with high temperatures, oppressive conditions result.
The rainfall in Egypt occurs largely in the winter months; it is meagre on average but highly variable. The amount diminishes sharply southward; the annual average at Alexandria is about seven inches (178 millimetres), Cairo has about one inch, and Aswan receives only about one-tenth of an inch. The Red Sea coastal plain and the Western Desert are almost rainless. The Sinai Peninsula receives somewhat more rainfall: the northern sector has an annual average of about five inches.
Plant and animal life
In spite of the lack of rainfall, the natural vegetation of Egypt is varied. Much of the Western Desert is totally devoid of plant life of any kind, but where some form of water exists the usual desert growth of perennials and grasses is found; the coastal strip has a rich plant life in spring. The Eastern Desert receives sparse rainfall; it supports a varied vegetation that includes tamarisk, acacia, and markh (a leafless, thornless tree with bare branches and slender twigs), as well as a great variety of thorny shrubs, small succulents, and aromatic herbs. This growth is even more striking in the wadis of the Red Sea Hills and of Sinai and in the Elba Mountains in the southeast.
The Nile and irrigation canals and ditches support many varieties of water plants; the lotus of antiquity is to be found in drainage channels in the Delta. There are more than 100 kinds of grasses, among them bamboo and halfa' (a coarse, long grass growing near water). Robust perennial reeds such as the Spanish reed and the common reed are widely distributed in Lower Egypt, but the papyrus, cultivated in antiquity, is now found only in botanical gardens.
The date palm, both cultivated and subspontaneous, is found throughout the Delta, in the Nile Valley, and in the oases. The doum palm (an African fan palm) is identified particularly with Upper Egypt and the oases, although there are scattered examples elsewhere.
There are very few native trees. The Phoenician juniper is the only native conifer, although there are several cultivated conifer species. The acacia is widely distributed, as are eucalyptus and sycamore. The casuarina, one of the most important timber trees in the country, was introduced in the 19th century. Other foreign importations, such as jacaranda, poinciana (a tree with orange or scarlet flowers), and lebbek (a leguminous tree), have become a characteristic feature of the Egyptian landscape.
Domestic animals include buffalo, camels, donkeys, sheep, and goats, the last of which are particularly noticeable in the Egyptian countryside. The animals that figure so prominently on the ancient Egyptian friezes—hippopotamuses, giraffes, and ostriches—no longer exist in Egypt; crocodiles are found only south of the Aswan High Dam. The largest wild animal is the mountain sheep, which survives in the southern fastnesses of the Western Desert. Other desert animals are the dorcas gazelle, the miniature desert fox, the mountain goat, the Egyptian hare, and two kinds of jerboa (a mouselike rodent with long hindlegs for jumping). The Egyptian jackal still exists, and the cony (a small rodent) is found in the Sinai mountains. There are two carnivorous mammals: a species of wildcat and the striped Egyptian mongoose. Several varieties of lizard are found, including the large monitor. Poisonous snakes include more than one species of viper; the speckled snake is found throughout the Nile Valley and the Egyptian cobra in agricultural areas. Scorpions are common in desert regions. There are numerous species of rodents, among which can be found the powerfully built Pharaoh's rat. Many varieties of insects are to be found, including the Egyptian locust.
Egyptian vultures (Neophron percnopterus).
©E.R. Degginger
Egypt is rich in bird life. Many birds pass through in large numbers on their spring and autumn migrations; in all, there are more than 200 migrating types to be seen, as well as more than 150 resident birds. The hooded crow is a familiar resident, and the black kite is a characteristic resident along the Nile Valley and in al-Fayyum. Among the birds of prey are the lanner falcon and the kestrel. Lammergeier and golden eagles are residents of the Eastern Desert and Sinai. The sacred ibis (a long-billed wading bird) is no longer found, but the great egret and buff-backed heron are residents of the Nile Valley and al-Fayyum, as is the hoopoe (a bird with an erectile, fanlike crest). Resident desert birds are a distinct category, numbering about 24 kinds.
The Nile contains about 190 varieties of fish, the most common being bulti (a coarse-scaled, spiny-finned fish) and the Nile perch. The lakes on the Delta coast contain mainly buri (gray mullet). Lake QaIun in al-Fayyui muhafazah (governorate) has been stocked with buri and Lake Nasser with bulti, which grow very large in its waters.
Settlement patterns
Physiographically, Egypt is usually divided into four major regions—the Nile Valley and Delta, the Eastern Desert, the Western Desert, and Sinai. When both physical and cultural characteristics are considered together, however, the country may be divided into six subregions—the Nile Delta; the Nile Valley from Cairo to south of Aswan; the Nubian Valley (since the early 1970s filled by Lake Nasser); the Eastern Desert and the Red Sea coast; Sinai; and the Western Desert and its oases.
The Delta
The Nile Delta, or Lower Egypt, covers an area of 9,650 square miles. It is 100 miles long from Cairo to the Mediterranean, with a coastline stretching 150 miles from Alexandria to Port Said. Much of the Delta coast is taken up by the brackish lagoons of Lakes Maryut, Idku, Burullus, and Manzilah. The conversion of the Delta to perennial irrigation has made possible the raising of two or three crops a year, instead of one, over more than half of its total area.
About half of the population of the Delta are peasants (fellahin)—either small landowners or labourers—living on the produce of the land. The remainder live in towns or cities, the largest of which is Cairo. As a whole, they have had greater contact with the outside world, particularly with the rest of the Middle East and Europe, than the inhabitants of the more remote southern valley and are generally less traditional and conservative.
The Valley
The cultivated portion of the Nile Valley between Cairo and Aswan varies from five to 10 miles in width, although there are places where it narrows to a few hundred yards and others where it broadens to 14 miles. Since the completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970, the 2,500,000-acre valley has been under perennial irrigation. The inhabitants of the Valley from Cairo up to Aswan muhafazah are referred to as Sa'idi (Upper Egyptians) and are more conservative than the Delta people. In some areas women still do not appear in public without a veil; family honour is very important, and vendetta laws apply. Until the building of the High Dam, the Aswan muhafazah was one of the poorest in the Valley and the most remote from outside influences.
The Nubian Valley, or Lake Nasser
Until it was flooded by the waters impounded behind the High Dam to form Lake Nasser, the Nubian Valley of the Nile extended for 160 miles between the town of Aswan and the Sudanese border—a narrow and picturesque gorge with a limited cultivable area. The 100,000 inhabitants were resettled, mainly in the government-built villages of New Nubia, at Kawm Umbu (Kom Ombo), north of Aswan. Lake Nasser was developed during the 1970s for its fishing and as a tourist area, and settlements have grown up around it.
The Eastern Desert
A seminomadic camp near St. Paul's monastery in Al-Bahr al-Ahmar governorate, Egypt.
Kurt Scholz/Shostal Associates
The Eastern Desert comprises almost one-fourth of the land surface of Egypt and covers an area of about 85,690 square miles. The northern tier is a limestone plateau, consisting of rolling hills, stretching from the Mediterranean coastal plain to a point roughly opposite Qina on the Nile. Near Qina, the plateau breaks up into cliffs about 1,600 feet high and is deeply scored by wadis, which make the terrain very difficult to traverse. The outlets of some of the main wadis form deep bays, which contain small settlements of seminomads. The second tier includes the sandstone plateau from Qina southward. The plateau is also deeply indented by ravines, but they are relatively free from obstacles, and some are usable as routes. The third tier consists of the Red Sea Hills and the Red Sea coastal plain. The hills run from near Suez to the Sudanese border; they are not a continuous range but consist of a series of interlocking systems more or less in alignment. They are geologically complex, with ancient igneous and metamorphic rocks. These include granite that, in the neighbourhood of Aswan, extends across the Nile Valley to form the First Cataract—that is, the first set of rapids on the river. At the foot of the Red Sea Hills the narrow coastal plain widens southward, and parallel to the shore there are almost continuous coral reefs. In popular conception and usage, the Red Sea Littoral can be regarded as a subregion in itself.
The majority of the sedentary population of the Eastern Desert live in the few towns and settlements along the coast, the largest being Ra's Gharib. No accurate figures are available for the nomadic population, but they are believed to constitute about 12 percent of the region's total population. They belong to various tribal groups, the most important being—from north to south—the Huwaytat, Ma'azah, 'Ababdah, and Bisharin. There are more true nomads in the Eastern than the Western Desert because of the greater availability of pasture and water. They live either by herding goats, sheep, and camels or by trading—mainly with mining and petroleum camps or with the fishing communities on the coast.
The Western Desert
Moving sands in the Sahara near Al-Jadidah, Egypt.
Georg Gerster/Photo Researchers
The Western Desert comprises two-thirds of the land surface of Egypt and covers an area of about 262,800 square miles. From its highest altitude—more than 3,300 feet—on the plateau of al-Jilf al-Kabir in the southeast, the rocky plateau slopes gradually northeastward to the first of the depressions that are a characteristic feature of the Western Desert—that containing the oases of al-Kharijah and ad-Dakhilah. Farther north are oases of al-Farafirah and al-BahIiyah. Northwestward from the latter the plateau continues to fall toward the Qattara Depression (Munkhafad al-Qattarah), which is uninhabited. West of the Qattara Depression and near the Libyan border is the largest and most populous oasis, that of Siwa. It has been inhabited for thousands of years and is less influenced by modern development. South of the Qattara Depression, and extending west to the Libyan border, the Western Desert is composed of great ridges of blown sand, interspersed with stony tracts. Beyond the Qattara Depression northward, the edge of the plateau follows the Mediterranean, leaving a narrow coastal plain.
Outside the oases, the habitable areas of the Western Desert, mainly near the coast, are occupied by the Awlad 'Ali tribe. Apart from small groups of camel herders in the south, the population is no longer totally nomadic. Somewhat less than half are seminomadic herdsmen; the remainder are settled and, in addition to maintaining herds of sheep and goats, pursue such activities as fruit growing, fishing, trading, and handicrafts.
The Western Desert supports a much larger population than the Eastern Desert. Matruh, an important summer resort on the Mediterranean, is the only urban centre. Other scattered communities are found mainly near railway stations and along the northern cultivated strip.
The oases, though geographically a part of the Western Desert, are ethnically and culturally distinct. The southern oases of al-Kharijah and ad-Dakhilah have been developed to some extent as part of a reclamation project centred on exploiting underground water resources. Other oases are al-Farafirah, al-Bahriyah, and Siwa.
Sinai
Sinai comprises a wedge-shaped block of territory with its base along the Mediterranean coast and its apex bounded by the Gulfs of Suez and Aqaba; it covers an area of approximately 23,000 square miles. Its southern portion consists of rugged, sharply serrated mountains. The central area of Sinai consists of two plateaus, at-Tih and al-'Ajmah, both deeply indented and dipping northward toward Wadi al-'Arish. Toward the Mediterranean, the northward plateau slope is broken by dome-shaped hills; between them and the coast are long, parallel lines of dunes, some of which are more than 300 feet high. The most striking feature of the coast itself is the 60-mile-long salt lagoon, Lake Bardawil.
The majority of the population are Arabs, many of whom have settled around al-'Arish and in the northern coastal area, although substantial numbers in the central plateau and the Sinai mountains continue to be nomadic or seminomadic. Another concentration of sedentary population is found at al-Qantarah, on the east side of the Suez Canal.
Rural settlement
The settled Egyptian countryside, throughout the Delta and the Nile Valley to the High Dam, exhibits great homogeneity, although minor variations occur from north to south.
Farmland near Cairo, Egypt.
©Robert Holmes
The typical rural settlement is a compact village surrounded by intensively cultivated fields. The villages range in population from 500 to more than 10,000. They are basically similar in physical appearance and design, except for minor local variations in building materials, design, and decoration. The date palm, sycamore, eucalyptus, and casuarina are common features of the landscape. Until comparatively recently, the only source of drinking water was the Nile; in consequence, many of the villages are built along the banks of its canals. Some of the oldest villages are situated on mounds—a relic of the days of basin irrigation and annual flooding.
In the Delta the houses, one or two stories high, are built of mud bricks plastered with mud and straw; in the southern parts of the Valley more stone is used. The houses are joined to one another in a continuous row. In a typical house the windows consist of a few small round or square openings, barely permitting enough air or light to enter. The roofs are flat, built of layers of dried date leaves, with date-palm rafters; they are used to store corn (maize) and cotton stalks, as well as dung cakes used for fuel. Roofs are also a favourite sleeping place on hot summer nights. For grain storage small cone-shaped silos of plastered mud are built on the roof and are then sealed to prevent the ravages of insects and rodents.
The houses of the poorer peasants usually consist of a narrow passageway, a bedroom, and a courtyard; part of the courtyard may be used as an enclosure for farm animals. Furniture is sparse. Ovens are made of plastered mud and are built into the wall of the courtyard or inside the house. In the larger and more prosperous villages, houses are built of burnt bricks reinforced with concrete, are more spacious, and often house members of an extended family. Furniture, running water, bathroom installations, and electricity are additional signs of prosperity.
Typical features of the smaller Egyptian village, in both the Delta and the Valley, are the mosque or the church, the primary school, the decorated pigeon cote, service buildings belonging to the government, and a few shops. Most of the people in the smaller villages are engaged in agriculture. In the larger villages, there may be some professional and semiprofessional inhabitants as well as more artisans, skilled workers, and shopkeepers. Outside the larger settlements, “combined service units”—consisting of modern buildings enclosing the social service unit, village cooperative, health unit, and school—are sometimes found, standing in striking contrast to the mud houses of the village itself.
Egyptian agricultural worker wearing a traditional djellaba (…
©1992 Bill Lyons
The population density of the inhabited area is such that the presence of people is obvious everywhere, even in the open countryside. In the early morning and the late afternoon, the peasants can be seen in large numbers on the roads, going to or coming from the fields with their farm animals. During the entire day the men, with their long tunics (gallabiyahs) tucked up around the waist, can be seen working the land with age-old implements such as the fas (hoe) and minjal (sickle); occasionally a modern tractor is seen. In the Delta older women in long, black robes, younger ones in more colourful cottons, and children over six years of age help with the less laborious tasks. In some parts of the Valley, however, women over age 16 do not work in the field, and their activities are confined to the household. They seldom appear in public except with a black muslin headdress covering their heads and faces. Young children can be seen everywhere—an omnipresent reminder of the high birthrate.
Unless situated on a highway, villages are reached by unpaved dirt roads. Inside the villages the roads consist mainly of narrow, winding footpaths. All villages, however, have at least one motorable road.
The Western Desert oases are not compact villages but small, dispersed agglomerations surrounded by green patches of cultivation; they are often separated from each other by areas of sand. Al-Kharijah, for example, is the largest of five scattered villages. Traditionally, the houses in the oases were up to six stories high, made of packed mud, and clustered close together for defense. Modern houses are usually two stories high and farther apart.
Urban settlement
Although for census purposes Egyptian towns are considered to be urban centres, some of them are overgrown villages, containing large numbers of peasants and persons engaged in work relating to agriculture and rural enterprises. Some of the towns that have acquired urban status in the second half of the 20th century continue to be largely rural, although they have government officials, people engaged in trade and commerce, industrial workers, technicians, and professional people among their residents. One characteristic of towns and, indeed, of the larger cities is their rural fringe. Towns and cities have grown at the expense of agricultural land, with urban dwellings and apartment buildings mushrooming haphazardly among the fields. There is little evidence of town or city planning or of adherence to building regulations; often mud village houses are embraced within the confines of a city.
Buildings in towns and smaller cities are usually two-storied houses or apartment blocks four to six stories high. The better ones are lime washed, with flat roofs and numerous balconies; other houses and buildings are often of unpainted red brick and concrete.
Whereas most of the cities of Egypt do not have many distinctive features, some such as Cairo, Alexandria, and Aswan have special characteristics of their own. Cairo is a complex and crowded metropolis, with architecture representing more than 1,000 years of history. Greater Cairo (including al-Jizah and other suburban settlements) and Alexandria, together with the most important towns along the Suez Canal—Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez—are modern and Western in appearance. Extensive rebuilding of the towns in the canal zone, severely damaged in the fighting between 1967 and 1973, followed the peace treaty with Israel in 1979.
The people
Linguistic composition
A street scene in Cairo, Egypt. The billboard is an advertisement for an Egyptian film.
Sean Sprague—Panos Pictures
For almost 13 centuries Arabic has been the written and spoken language of Egypt. Before the Arab invasion in AD 639, Coptic, the language descended from ancient Egyptian, was the language of both religious and everyday life for the mass of the population; by the 12th century, however, it had been totally replaced by Arabic, continuing only as a liturgical language for the Coptic Orthodox Church. Arabic has become the language of both the Egyptian Christian and Muslim.
The written form of the Arabic language, in grammar and syntax, has remained substantially unchanged since the 7th century. In other ways, however, the written language has changed—the modern forms of style, word sequence, and phraseology are simpler and more flexible than in classical Arabic and are often directly derivative of English or French.
This modern literary Arabic, which is developing out of classical or medieval Arabic, is the lingua franca shared by educated persons throughout the Arab world. Alongside it there exist the various regional dialects of Arabic, which differ widely from it as well as from one another. Within the amorphous grouping referred to as Egyptian colloquial, a number of separate dialects can be discerned—each fairly homogeneous but with further strata of variation within the group. One of these is the dialect of the Bedouin of the Eastern Desert and of Sinai; the Bedouin of the Western Desert constitute a separate dialect group. Upper Egypt has its own vernacular, markedly different from that of Cairo. The Cairo dialect is used, with variations, throughout the towns of the Delta; the rural people have their own vernacular. Direct contact with foreigners over a long period has led to the incorporation of many loanwords into Cairene colloquial Arabic. The long contact with foreigners and the existence of foreign-language schools also explains the polyglot character of Egyptian society. Most educated Egyptians are fluent in English or French or both, in addition to Arabic.
There are other minor linguistic groups. The Hamitic Beja of the southern section of the Eastern Desert use Badawi. At Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert there are groups whose language is related to Berber. Nubians speak a language containing both Sudanic and Hamitic features. There are other minority linguistic groups, notably Greek, Italian, and Armenian, although they are much smaller than they once were.
Ethnic composition
The population of the Nile Valley and the Delta (comprising about 99 percent of Egypt) forms a fairly homogeneous group whose dominant physical characteristics are the result of the admixture of the indigenous African population with those of Arab ancestry. The peasant, or fellah, is less racially mixed than the town dweller. In the towns—the northern Delta towns especially—the foreign invader, Persian, Roman, Greek, Crusader, and Turk, has left behind a more heterogeneous mixture. The inhabitants of the middle Nile Valley up to Aswan are the Sa'idi (Upper Egyptians).
Nubians differ culturally from other Egyptians in that their kinship structure goes beyond the lineage; they are divided into clans and broader segments, whereas among other Egyptians of the Valley and Lower Egypt known members of the lineage are the only ones recognized as kin.
The deserts of Egypt contain nomadic, seminomadic, or sedentary but formerly nomadic groups, with distinct ethnic characteristics. Apart from a few tribal groups of non-Arab stock and the mixed urban population, the inhabitants of Sinai and the northern section of the Eastern Desert are all fairly recent immigrants from Arabia. They bear some physical resemblances to Arabian Bedouins. Their social organization is tribal, each group conceiving of itself as being united by a bond of blood and as having descended from a common ancestor. Originally tent dwellers and nomadic herders, many have become seminomads or even totally sedentary, as in northern Sinai.
The southern section of the Eastern Desert is inhabited by the Hamitic Beja. They bear a distinct resemblance to the surviving depictions of predynastic Egyptians. The Egyptian Beja are divided into two tribes—the 'Ababdah and the Bisharin. The 'Ababdah occupy the Eastern Desert south of a line between Qina and al-Ghurdaqah; there are also several groups settled along the Nile between Aswan and Qina. The Bisharin live mainly in The Sudan, although some dwell in the Elba Mountain region, their traditional place of origin. Both the 'Ababdah and Bisharin people are nomadic pastoralists who tend herds of camels, goats, and sheep.
The inhabitants of the Western Desert, outside the oases, are of mixed Arab and Berber descent. They are divided into two groups, the Sa'adi and the Murabitin. The Sa'adi regard themselves as descended from Banu Hilal and Banu Sulayman, the great Arab tribes that immigrated into North Africa in the 11th century. The most important and numerous of the Sa'adi group are the Awlad 'Ali. The Murabitin clans occupy a client status in relation to the Sa'adi and may be descendants of the original Berber inhabitants of the region. Originally herders and tent dwellers, the Bedouin of the Western Desert have become either seminomadic or totally sedentary. They are not localized by clan, and members of a single group may be widely dispersed.
The original inhabitants of the oases of the Western Desert were Berber. Many peoples have since mixed with them, including Egyptians from the Nile Valley, Arabs, Sudanese, Turks, and, particularly in the case of al-Kharijah, black Africans—for this was the point of entry into Egypt of the caravan route from Darfur, the Darb al-Arba'in.
In addition to the indigenous groups, there are in Egypt a number of small foreign ethnic groups. In the 19th century there was rapid growth of communities of unassimilated foreigners, mainly European, living in Egypt; these acquired a dominating influence over finance, industry, and government. In the 1920s, which was a peak period, the number of foreigners in Egypt was in excess of 200,000, the largest community being the Greeks, followed by the Italians, British, and French. Since Egypt's independence the size of the foreign communities has been greatly reduced.
Religions
Mosques and other religious architecture in Egypt.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Islam is the official religion of Egypt, and a large majority of the population embrace the Sunni, or orthodox, branch of Islam. A strong sense of piety is a characteristic of the Egyptian Muslim. Prayer is observed punctiliously, particularly public prayer in the mosques, and fasting during the month of Ramadan (the ninth month of the Islamic calendar) is strictly observed. Almsgiving and pilgrimage to Mecca are, if possible, also enjoined.
The majority of the Christian population of Egypt are Copts. In language, dress, and way of life they are indistinguishable from Muslim Egyptians; their church ritual and traditions, however, date from before the Arab conquest in the 7th century. Ever since it broke with the Eastern Church in the 5th century, the Coptic Orthodox Church has maintained its autonomy, and its beliefs and ritual have remained basically unchanged. The Copts have traditionally been associated with certain handicrafts and trades and, above all, with accountancy, banking, commerce, and the civil service; there are, however, rural communities that are wholly Coptic, as well as mixed Coptic–Muslim villages. As a result of marrying almost exclusively within their community, many Copts are thought to preserve in their physical features the characteristics of the people of Pharaonic Egypt.
The Copts are most numerous in the middle Nile Valley muhafazat of Asyut, al-Minya, and Qina. About one-fourth of the total Coptic population lives in Cairo.
Among other religious groups are the Coptic Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Armenian Orthodox and Catholic, Maronite, Syrian Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant. There is also a small Jewish community.
Demographic trends
Most of Egypt's people live along the banks of the Nile River, where the population density, estimated to be more than 2,700 persons per square mile (1,100 persons per square kilometre), is one of the highest in the world. The rapidly growing population is young, with more than one-third of the total under 15 years of age. Despite improvements in health care, infant mortality is high and about half of all deaths occur among children less than five years of age. Life expectancy, however, increased from only about 33 years in 1927 to almost 63 years by 2000. Almost half of the population lives in urban areas.
Laila Shukry El Hamamsy
Marsden Jones
Derek Hopwood
Charles Gordon Smith
The economy
Harvested cotton being collected near al-Fayyum, Egypt.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand—Corbis
The economy of Egypt, according to the constitution of 1971, is one based on socialism, with the people controlling all means of production. The progress of socialism after 1952 was initially hesitant, despite land-reform measures, but it gathered momentum after 1961, when major nationalization steps were taken in an attempt to curb the private sector and destroy the political power of Egyptian capitalists. Until the early 1970s almost all important sectors of the economy either were public or were strictly controlled by the government. This included large-scale industry, communications, banking and finance, the cotton trade, foreign trade as a whole, and many other sectors. Private enterprise came gradually to find its scope restricted, but some room for maneuver was still left in real estate and in agriculture and, later, in the export trade. Personal income, as well as land ownership, was strictly limited by the government. Some of these restrictions have been relaxed, permitting greater private sector participation in various economic areas.
The public sector and the role of government
As the role of the private sector lessened in the 1950s and '60s, that of the government continuously expanded. The government, when not actually in possession, regulates all important aspects of production and distribution. It imposes controls on agricultural prices, controls rent, runs the internal trade, regulates foreign travel and the use of foreign exchange, and appoints and supervises the boards of directors of corporations. The government initiates projects and allocates investment. Although the everyday running of corporations is left to the boards of directors, these receive instructions from public boards, and the chairmen of boards receive their instructions from the appropriate minister. The government formulates five-year development plans to guide economic development.
Taxation
With the majority of the population earning very low incomes, direct taxation falls on the few rich; income-tax rates are made sharply progressive in an attempt to achieve a degree of equality in income distribution. Direct taxes on income, mostly levied on businesses, account for about two-thirds of governmental revenue.
Trade unions and employer associations
Trade unions are closely controlled by the government. Workers obtain a share of the profits earned by corporations and elect their representatives to boards of directors; they are also heavily represented in the National Assembly. In all these activities, however, official selection works side by side with free elections. Trade unions are often vocally active in national policies but are seldom the instrument for negotiating higher wages or better work conditions. There are a few employers' associations, but they have little industrial power.
Contemporary economic policies
In the early 1970s the Egyptian government campaigned for increased foreign investment and began receiving financial aid from the oil-rich Arab states. Although Arab aid was suspended after the signing of the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, the subsequent return of several Western and Japanese corporations, associated with the normalization of Egyptian relations with Israel, increased the potential for further foreign investment in the country. Much of the effort exerted by the government in the early 1980s was devoted to adjusting the economy to the situation resulting from the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. With decreased expenditure on defense, increased allocations were made available for development. Egypt's economy began to be more resilient, primarily because of discoveries of oil and increased Western aid.
Increases in population have put pressure on resources, however, and underemployment has become endemic.
Wages and cost of living
The general standard of living in Egypt is rather low; in relation to the size of its population, its economic resources are limited. Land remains its main source of natural wealth, but the amount of land is insufficient to support the population adequately. The realization of the need to curb the rate of population increase led, in 1964, to a national family planning program, which has had only limited success.
The rural population, especially the landless agricultural labourers, has the lowest standard of living in the country. Industrial and urban workers enjoy, on the whole, a higher standard. The highest wages are earned in such industries as the petroleum and manufacturing industries; many workers in industry receive additional benefits by way of social insurance and extra health and housing facilities. The salaries of professional groups are also low. Low wage levels have to some extent been offset by the low cost of living, but by the late 1970s this advantage was eliminated by high inflation rates.
Resources
About 96 percent of Egypt's total area is desert. Lack of forests, permanent meadows, or pastures places a heavy burden on the available arable land, which constitutes only about 3 percent of the total area. This limited area, which sustains on the average almost seven persons per acre, is, however, highly fertile and is cropped more than once a year. Although a large percentage of the population derives its livelihood from agriculture, a growing proportion of the labour force is engaged in manufacturing, and the contribution of the manufacturing and mining sectors to the domestic product has grown to twice that of agriculture—with service activities contributing most of the remainder. Because of the shortage of land, underemployment of labour began to be manifest in agriculture early in the 20th century, and the development of nonagricultural production since then has failed to provide full employment to the increasing labour force.
Mineral resources
Compared with the physical size of the country and the level of its population, the mineral resources of Egypt are scanty. The search for petroleum began earlier in Egypt than elsewhere in the Middle East, and production on a small scale began as early as 1908, but it was not until the mid-1970s that significant results were achieved. By the early 1980s Egypt had become an important oil producer, although total production was relatively small by Middle Eastern standards. Several of Egypt's major known phosphate deposits are mined at Isna, Hamrawayn, and Safajah. Coal deposits are located in the partially developed Maghara mines in the Sinai Peninsula. Manganese deposits located in the Eastern Desert have been the primary source for manganese production since 1967, and there are also reserves of manganese on the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt mines iron ore from deposits at Aswan, and development work has continued at al-Wahat al-Bahriyah Oasis. Chromium, uranium, and gold deposits are also found in the country.
Biological resources
Egypt's biological resources, centred around the Nile, have long been one of its principal assets. There are no forests or any permanent vegetation of economic significance, apart from the land under cultivation. Water buffalo, cattle, asses, goats, sheep, and camels are the most important livestock. Animal husbandry and poultry production have continued to increase.
Hydroelectric and other power resources
The Nile constitutes an incomparable source of energy; further sources are represented by coal, oil, and gas deposits. Almost half of Egypt's electrical energy comes from thermal stations; hydroelectric plants, including those at the Aswan High Dam, supply the remainder.
Agriculture and fishing
A stand of sugarcane on the west bank of the Nile River, near Dandarah, Egypt.
Bob Burch/Bruce Coleman Inc.
Agriculture is an important sector of the Egyptian economy. It contributes substantially to the gross national product, employs a large part of the labour force, and provides the country—through agricultural exports—with an important part of its foreign exchange. Increased pressure of population has led to an intensification of cultivation almost without parallel elsewhere. Heavy capital is invested in the form of canals, drains, dams, water pumps, and barrages; the investment of skilled labour, commercial fertilizers, and pesticides is also great. Thus, despite multiple cropping, the yields of the land are exceptionally high. Strict crop rotation—in addition to government controls on the allocation of area to crops, on varieties planted, on the distribution of fertilizers and pesticides, and on marketing—contributes to the high productivity of agriculture.
Unlike the situation in comparable developing countries, Egyptian agriculture has an overwhelmingly commercial rather than subsistence basis. Field crops contribute some three-fourths of the total value of Egypt's agricultural production, while the rest comes from livestock products, fruits and vegetables, and other specialty crops. Egypt has two seasons of cultivation, one for winter and another for summer crops. The main summer field crop is cotton, which occupies more than one-fifth of the season's arable land, absorbs much of the available labour, and represents a sizable portion of the value of exports. Egypt is the world's principal producer of long-staple cotton (1 1/8 inches [2.85 centimetres] and longer), normally producing about one-third of the world crop, although total Egyptian production is only about 3 percent of all cotton produced in the world.
Among other principal field crops are corn (maize), rice, wheat, millet, and broad beans. Despite a considerable output, the cereal production in Egypt falls short of the country's total consumption; a substantial proportion of foreign exchange is spent annually on the import of cereals and milling products. Other important crops include sugarcane, alfalfa (lucerne), potatoes, and onions—the latter being normally an export item. Many varieties of fruit are grown, and some, such as citrus, are also exported.
Traditional irrigation methods in rural Egypt.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
In 1960–61 and 1968–69 about 896,100 acres were reclaimed. The total land reclaimed as a result of the Aswan High Dam project reached more than 1,000,000 acres by 1975, in addition to 700,000 acres converted from basin (one crop a year) irrigation to perennial irrigation. During the same period, however, an area almost as large was lost to agriculture as industry and towns grew.
Egypt has been the scene of one of the most successful attempts at land reform. In 1952 a limit of 200 acres was imposed on individual ownership of land, and this was lowered to 100 acres in 1961 and to 50 acres in 1969. By 1975 less than one-eighth of the total cultivated area was held by owners with 50 acres or more. The success of Egyptian land reform is indicated by the substantial rise of land yields after 1952. This was partly the result of several complementary measures of agrarian reform, such as regulation of land tenure and rent control, that accompanied the redistribution of the land.
Following the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the Egyptian government encouraged the development of a thriving fishing industry. Construction of such projects as a fish farm and fishery complex at Lake Nasser have led to a considerable increase in the number of freshwater fish and in the size of the yearly total catch. At the same time, catches of sea fish in the waters off the Nile Delta have declined. This is thought to be a consequence of the change in the flow and character of Nile water after the construction of the Aswan High Dam.
Industry
The development of the manufacturing industry was handicapped by the policy of free trade imposed on Egypt from the middle of the 19th century until about 1930. Nationalism and World War II gave great impetus to the foundation of industrial projects that are largely agriculturally based and oriented toward import substitution. During the 1950s the country's manufacturing sector began to grow, and manufacturing and mining now account for a substantial portion of the gross domestic product.
Emphasis was placed on the development of heavy industry after a long-term agreement was signed with the Soviet Union in 1964. Another agreement with the Soviet Union, signed in 1970, provided aid for the expansion of the iron and steel complex at Hulwan; the establishment of a number of power-based industries, including an aluminum complex to utilize the power generated by the High Dam; and the electrification of the countryside. An ammonium nitrate fertilizer plant was opened in 1971, based on the gases generated in the coking unit of the steel mill at Hulwan. There is also a nitrate fertilizer plant at Aswan.
Egypt has made great achievements in increasing industrial production in such traditional industries as spinning and weaving, as well as in modern industries like engineering and iron and steel production. Food processing and the manufacture of chemical products also are important to the Egyptian economy.
Before the completion of the Aswan High Dam power station in 1970, the bulk of Egypt's electricity was generated in thermal stations using coal or diesel fuel, but some hydroelectric power was also generated by the old Aswan Dam. The 12 turbines of the High Dam power station have a capacity of about 2,000,000 kilowatts and are capable of producing 10,000,000,000 kilowatt-hours a year; the capacity of the thermal stations is about 45 percent of that of the High Dam. Transmission lines carry the current from Aswan to Cairo and to points farther north for use in urban centres and in manufacturing. The production of electric power from the High Dam has been limited, however, by the need to reconcile demands for power with the demands for irrigation water.
The bulk of Egypt's petroleum comes from the rich Morgan, Ramadan, and July fields (both onshore and offshore) in the Gulf of Suez, which are operated by the Gulf of Suez Petroleum Company, and from the Abu Rudays area of the Sinai on the Gulf of Suez. In cooperation with Phillips Petroleum Company, Egypt also extracts oil from fields at al-'Alamayn and Razzaq in the Western Desert. Active drilling for oil, involving several international interests, including those of the United States and several European nations, has continued in both the Eastern and the Western deserts.
In the process of searching for oil, some significant natural gas deposits have been located. Phillips has located wells in the Abu Qir area, northeast of Alexandria. A joint Egyptian-Italian gas discovery was made in the north Delta near Abu Madi in 1970; this was developed partly to supply a fertilizer plant and partly to fuel the industrial centres in the north and northwest Delta. In 1974 Abu Madi became the first Egyptian gas field to begin production. Other natural gas fields are located in the Western Desert and the Gulf of Suez.
Egypt has several oil refineries, two of which are located at Suez. The first of Egypt's twin crude pipelines, linking the Gulf of Suez to the Mediterranean near Alexandria, was opened in 1977. This Suez–Mediterranean pipeline, known as Sumed, has an annual capacity for transmitting 80,000,000 tons of oil. The Sumed pipeline was financed by a consortium of Arab countries, primarily Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt. In 1981 a crude oil pipeline was opened to link Ras Shuqir, on the Red Sea coast, with the refinery at Musturud, north of Cairo. An additional oil pipeline links Musturud with Alexandria.
Finance
The banking system of Egypt is centred on the Central Bank of Egypt, created in 1960 from the issue department of the National Bank of Egypt. In 1961 all banks operating in Egypt were nationalized, and their operations were concentrated in five commercial banks, in addition to the Central Bank, the government-sponsored Public Organization for Agricultural Credits and Co-operatives, the Development Industrial Bank, and three mortgage banks.
The government again reorganized the banking system in the early 1970s, merging some of the major banks and assigning special functions to each of the rest. Two new banks were created, and foreign banks were again permitted in the country as part of a program aimed at liberalizing the economy. Of particular interest were joint banking ventures between Egyptian and foreign banks. The stock exchanges at Cairo and Alexandria, which had been closed since the early 1960s, were reopened. The cotton exchanges in Cairo and Alexandria, which had also been closed, were replaced by a supervisory council responsible for regulating the cotton industry. In 1980 Egypt's first international bank was opened and a national investment bank was established.
The supply of money has, in general, followed the development of the economy; the authorities have aimed at tolerable increases in the price level, although since the 1973 war some prices have soared and inflation rates have risen sharply.
Egypt is a member of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since World War II the international liquidity of the Egyptian economy, including the Special Drawing Rights, added in 1970, has been depressed. In the late 1970s both internal and external debts rose, primarily because of large government subsidies to the private sector. In the 1980s the government gradually introduced price increases on goods and services, with the goal of eventually reducing subsidies.
Trade
Imports into Egypt average about one-third and exports about one-tenth of the gross domestic product. Since World War II exports have tended to fall short of imports. The trade deficit reached a peak in 1966 and was particularly sizable from 1960 to 1965 as expenditure on development rose. After the 1973 war there was a decided effort to restrict imports and stimulate exports, but this met with little success. The trade deficit continued to rise to record highs in the early and mid-1980s, largely because of the decline in revenue from petroleum exports and the increase in food imports.
Almost two-thirds of imports consist of raw materials, mineral and chemical products, and capital goods (machinery, electrical apparatus, and transport equipment), more than one-fourth are foodstuffs, and the remainder are other consumer goods. More than one-half of the exports by value consist of petroleum and petroleum products, followed by raw cotton, cotton yarn, and fabrics. Raw materials, mineral and chemical products, and capital goods are also exported. Among agricultural exports are rice, onions, garlic, and citrus fruit.
Italy and France are among Egypt's largest markets. The United States, however, is the major source of Egypt's imports, followed by Germany, Italy, and France.
The economic boycott by other Arab states, which resulted from the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, did not have a serious effect on Egypt's economy. In the early and mid-1980s Egypt's revenue fluctuated, however, in response to changes in oil sales and tourist revenue, and the country continued to have deficits in its foreign-trade balance. The deficit has been financed by international borrowing (primarily from the International Monetary Fund), transfers from Arab oil-producing countries, revenue from expatriate remittances, Suez Canal revenue, and changes in foreign assets and liabilities.
E.I.U.
Derek Hopwood
Charles Gordon Smith
Transportation
Almost the entire communications system is state-owned. It is adequate in terms of coverage, but stresses arise from excessive usage. The main patterns of transport flow reflect the topographical configuration of the country—that is to say, they follow the north–south course of the Nile, run along the narrow coastal plain of the Mediterranean Sea, and expand into a more complex system in the Delta.
Road network
About half of Egypt's total road network is paved. Rural roads are of dried mud, usually following the lines of the irrigation canals; many of the desert roads are little more than tracks. The Cairo–Alexandria highway runs via Banha, Tanta, and Damanhur. The alternate desert road to Cairo from Alexandria has been extensively improved, and a good road links Alexandria with Libya by way of Matruh on the Mediterranean coast. There are paved roads between Cairo and al-Fayyum, and good roads connect the various Delta and Suez Canal towns. A paved road parallels the Nile from Cairo south to Aswan, and another paved road runs from Asyut to al-Kharijah and ad-Dakhilah in the Western Desert. The coastal Red Sea route to Marsa al-'Alam is poorly paved, as are the connecting sections inland.
Railways
Railways connect Cairo with Alexandria and with the Delta and canal towns and also run southward to Aswan and the High Dam. Branch lines connect Cairo with al-Fayyum and Alexandria with Matruh. A network of light railways connects the Fayyum area and the Delta villages with the main lines. Diesel-driven trains operate along the main lines; electric lines connect Cairo with the suburbs of Hulwan and Heliopolis.
Navigable waterways
Cargo ship in the Suez Canal near Ismailia, Egypt.
Hubertus Kauns/SuperStock
Feluccas on the Nile River, near Luxor in Upper Egypt.
Robert Frerck/Odyssey Productions
The Suez Canal, closed in 1967, was reopened in 1975; it serves as a major link between the Mediterranean and Red seas. The Nile and its associated navigable canals provide an important means of transportation, primarily for heavy goods. There are roughly 2,000 miles of navigable waterways—about one-half of this total on the Nile, which is navigable throughout its length. The inland-waterway freight fleet consists of tugs, motorized barges, towed barges, and flat-bottomed feluccas (two- or three-masted lateen-rigged sailing ships; seephotograph).
Ports and shipping
In spite of its long coastline, Egypt has only three ports of any significance—Alexandria, Port Said, and Suez. Alexandria, with a fine natural harbour, handles most of the country's imports and exports, as well as the bulk of passenger traffic. Port Said, at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal, lacks the berthing and loading facilities of Alexandria. Suez's main function is that of an entry port for petroleum and minerals from the Egyptian Red Sea coast and for goods from the Far East.
Air transport
Cairo is an important communication centre for world air routes. The enlarged airport at Heliopolis, with its modern terminal building, is used by major international airlines, as is Nuzhah airport at Alexandria.
The national airline, Egypt Air, runs external services throughout the Middle East, as well as to Europe, North America, Africa, and the Far East; it also operates a domestic air service.
Government and social conditions
Government
Before the 1952 revolution, Egypt was a constitutional monarchy; the 1923 constitution, which followed the declaration of the end of the British protectorate, stated that Egypt was an independent sovereign Islamic state with Arabic as its language and provided for a representative parliament. This constitution was abolished in 1952, political parties were dissolved in 1953, and a new constitution was introduced in 1956. The Republic of Egypt was declared. Between 1958 and 1961 Egypt and Syria were merged into one state, called the United Arab Republic; the name was retained by Egypt upon Syria's secession in 1961. The National Union, organized in 1957 in place of the political parties abolished in 1953, became the Arab Socialist Union (ASU) in 1962.
In 1971 Egypt, Libya, and Syria agreed to establish the Confederation of Arab Republics. A draft constitution was accepted by the heads of state of each country and was approved by referenda in each of the three member states. The capital of the confederation was Cairo. In 1979, however, deteriorating relations between Egypt and other Arab nations led to the end of the confederation; following the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, most Arab economic ties with Egypt also were suspended.
On Sept. 11, 1971, a new constitution for Egypt was approved by referendum. It proclaimed the Arab Republic of Egypt to be “a democratic, socialist state” with Islam as its state religion and Arabic as its national language. It recognized three types of ownership—public, cooperative, and private. It guaranteed the equality of all Egyptians before the law and their protection against arbitrary intervention in the processes of law. It also affirmed the rights to peaceful assembly, education, and health and social security and the right to organize into associations or unions and to vote.
According to the constitution and its subsequent amendments, the president of the republic is the head of state and, together with the Cabinet, constitutes the executive authority. The president must be Egyptian, born of Egyptian parents, and not less than 40 years old. The presidential term is six years and may be extended to additional terms. The president has the power to appoint and dismiss one or more vice presidents, the prime minister, ministers, and deputy ministers. The legislative body is composed of the People's Assembly, which nominates the presidential candidate by a two-thirds majority. The candidate is then confirmed by national plebiscite.
The president is the supreme commander of the armed forces and has the right to grant amnesty and reduce sentence, the power to appoint civil and military officials and to dismiss them in a manner prescribed by the law, and the authority to call a referendum on matters of supreme importance. The president can, in exceptional cases and by investiture of the assembly, issue decrees having the force of law—but only for a defined time period.
Legislative power resides in the People's Assembly, which is composed of 444 elected members, some of whom must be women, and 10 additional members appointed by the president. The assembly is elected, under a complex system of proportional representation, for a five-year term. All males 18 years of age and older are required to vote, as well as all women on the register of voters. The president convenes and closes the sessions of the People's Assembly.
The People's Assembly's main function is to approve policy. Its members must ratify all laws and examine and approve the national budget. It also approves the program of each newly appointed Cabinet. Should it withdraw its confidence from the Cabinet or any of its members, that person is required to resign. The president cannot dissolve the assembly except under special circumstances and after a vote of approval by a people's referendum. Elections for a new assembly must be held within 60 days of dissolution.
The constitution also provides for a judiciary, independent of other authorities, whose functions and authority are governed by special legislation, and, as a result of an amendment approved by a 1980 referendum, for the Shura Assembly, a partially elective national advisory body. The National Defence Council, presided over by the president of the republic, is responsible for matters relating to security and defense.
Local government and administration
Until 1960, government administration was highly centralized; in that year, however, the local-government administrative system was established to promote decentralization and greater citizen participation in local government.
The 1960 Local Administration Law provides for three levels of local administration—the muhafazat (governorates), the markaz (districts or counties), and the qariyah (villages). The structure combines features of both local administration and local self-government. There are two councils at each administrative level: a mostly elected people's council and an appointed executive council. Although these councils exercise broad legislative powers, they are controlled by the central government.
The country is divided into 26 muhafazat. Five cities—Cairo, Alexandria, Ismailia, Port Said, and Suez—have muhafazah status. The governor is appointed and can be dismissed by the president of the republic. He is the highest executive authority in the muhafazah has administrative authority over all government personnel except judges in his muhafazah and is responsible for implementing policy.
The muhafazah council is composed of a majority of elected members. Although it has not been possible in practice, according to law at least one-half of the members of the muhafazah council are to be farmers and workers. The town or district councils and the village councils are established on the same principles as those underlying the muhafazah councils.
The local councils perform a wide variety of functions in education, health, public utilities, housing, agriculture, and communications; they are also responsible for promoting the cooperative movement and for implementing parts of the national plan. Local councils obtain their funds from national revenue, a tax on buildings and lands within the muhafazah, miscellaneous local taxes or fees, profits from public utilities and commercial enterprises, and national subsidies, grants, and loans.
The political process
After 1962 all popular participation and representation in the political process was through the Arab Socialist Union. In 1976, however, the ASU lost its status as the sole legal political organization, and other political parties soon formed; their right to exist was recognized by a law adopted in June 1977. The ASU was abolished by constitutional amendment in 1980.
The National Democratic Party (NDP), formed by Pres. Anwar el-Sadat in 1978, serves as the official government party and holds a majority of seats in the People's Assembly. The left-wing opposition is the National Progressive Unionist Party and the Socialist Labour Party. The prerevolutionary Wafd Party has been re-formed, and one religious party, the Umma, has been licensed. Officially unrepresented are the Communists, extreme religious groups, and avowed Nasserists.
Justice
The Egyptian constitution emphasizes the independent nature of the judiciary. There is to be no external interference with the due processes of justice. Judges are subject to no authority other than the law; they cannot be dismissed and are disciplined in the manner prescribed by law. Judges are appointed by the state, with the prior approval of the Supreme Judicial Council under the chairmanship of the president. The council is also responsible for the affairs of all judicial bodies; its composition and special functions are specified by law.
The court structure can be regarded as falling into four categories, each of which has a civil and criminal division. These courts of general jurisdiction include district tribunals, tribunals of the first instance, courts of appeal, and the Court of Cassation. Court sessions are public, except where consideration of matters of public order or decency decides otherwise. Sentence is passed in open session.
In addition, there are special courts, such as military courts and courts of public security—the latter dealing with crimes against the well-being or security of the state. The Council of State is a separate judicial body, dealing especially with administrative disputes and disciplinary actions. The Supreme Constitutional Court in Cairo is the highest court in Egypt. Its functions include judicial review of the constitutionality of laws and regulations and the resolution of judicial conflicts among the courts.
Law enforcement
The Ministry of the Interior has direct control and supervision over all police and security functions at the muhafazah, district, and village levels. At the central level, the deputy minister for public security is responsible for general security, emigration, passports, port security, criminal investigation, ministerial guards, and emergency services. The deputy minister for special police is responsible for civil defense, traffic, prison administration, tourist police, and police transport and communications.
Education
At the end of the 19th century there were only three secondary and nine “higher” schools in Egypt; the educational structure continued to be based on the kuttabs, or Qur'an schools. In 1916 the latter were turned into elementary schools, and in 1923 a law was passed providing free compulsory education between the ages of seven and 12. A sharp increase in the annual budgetary allocation devoted to education occurred after World War II. Following the revolution of 1952, educational progress already achieved was accelerated and was accompanied by both the Egyptianization and Arabicization of the educational system. One of the most significant features of this progress has been the spread of women's education. By the late 1970s almost one-third of the students attending university were women. Women are no longer confined to the home; many fields of employment, including the professions and even politics, are now open to them. A further result of the expansion of education has been the emergence of an intellectual elite and the growth of a middle class, consisting of members of the professions, government officials, and businessmen. In spite of the rapid advance in the provision of education services, however, illiteracy has remained relatively high.
There are three stages of state general education—primary (six years), preparatory (three years), and secondary (three years). Primary education between the ages of six and 12 is compulsory. Pupils who are successful in examinations have the opportunity to continue their education first at the preparatory and then at the secondary level. There are two types of secondary school, general and technical; most technical schools are either commercial, agricultural, or industrial.
Al-Azhar Mosque (domed building on right), with adjoining buildings of al-Azhar University
Robert Frerck/Odyssey Productions
Mausoleum and madrasah of Sultan Qala'un, …
©A.F. Kersting
Alongside the Ministry of Education's system of general education, there is that provided by the institutes associated with al-Azhar University, centred on al-Azhar Mosque in the medieval quarter of Cairo. Al-Azhar has been a teaching centre for the entire Muslim world for nearly a millennium. Instruction is given at levels equivalent to those of the state schools, but in order to allow for greater emphasis on traditional Islamic subjects, the duration of training is lengthened by one year at the preparatory stage and two at the secondary. A large-scale modernization of the college-level curriculum, making it comparable to those of other state universities, has been carried out since 1961.
In the 1950s there were almost 300 foreign schools in Egypt, the majority of them French; many of these have since become, to varying degrees, Egyptianized. Pupils who attend these schools, at all levels, sit for the same state certificate examinations as those in the normal state system.
The major state universities are Cairo, Alexandria, 'Ayn Shams, and Asyut. In addition to the state university system, there is one private university, the American University in Cairo.
There are many institutes of higher learning, excluding institutes attached to universities or affiliated to the Ministry of Culture—such as the Institute of Dramatic Arts, the Cinema Institute, and the Institute of Ballet. These institutes specialize in commerce, industry, agriculture, the arts, physical culture, social service, domestic economy, and languages. Courses of study lead to a degree.
Health and welfare
The budget of the Ministry of Health has reflected a steadily increasing expenditure on public-health programs, and the numbers of government health centres, beds in public hospitals, doctors, and dentists have increased dramatically.
An important aspect of this development has been the expansion of health facilities in the rural areas of the country. In 1953 the government introduced what are termed combined service units; these differ from health centres in that they combine the functions of health centre, school, social-welfare unit, and agricultural extension services. In addition, rural health units further extend the health services available in rural communities. Each unit is operated by a team of seven or eight people, including one physician.
Well-trained physicians and specialists are available in large numbers in the cities and larger towns. The medical profession has prestige, and only the better qualified high school graduates are accepted into medical schools.
Significant efforts have been made to promote preventive medicine. Compulsory vaccination against smallpox, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and poliomyelitis is enforced for all infants during their first two years. Schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease that is widespread among the rural population, presents a serious health problem. All health centres offer treatment against it, but reinfection can easily occur. Epidemics of malaria have been eliminated, but the disease still exists in endemic form, mainly in southern Egypt. Treatment for malaria is provided at all health centres, and the spraying of houses in mosquito-breeding areas is carried out regularly. Attention has also been given to the problem of tuberculosis; centres have been established in every muhafazah, and mass X-ray and immunization campaigns have been carried out.
The government has attempted to socialize medicine through such measures as the nationalization and control of pharmaceutical industries, the nationalization of hospitals run by private organizations and associations, and expanded health insurance. A health insurance law was passed in 1964; it provides for compulsory health insurance for workers in firms employing more than 100 persons, as well as for all governmental and public employees.
Housing
Egypt has faced a serious urban housing shortage since World War II. The situation subsequently became aggravated by increased immigration from rural to urban areas, resulting in extreme urban overcrowding.
Although there is considerable concern over the housing problem, the combined efforts of both public and private sectors have been unable to meet the growing demand. Between 1970 and 1980, for example, approximately 300,000 housing units were built; this represented an increase of more than one-fourth of the total number of housing units. The increase in the urban population, however, was estimated at more than 40 percent during the same period; i.e., for every new housing unit built, 13 persons were added to the urban population.
In the rural areas villagers build their own houses at little cost with the materials available. The government has experimented in aiding self-help projects with state loans. Ambitious rural housing projects have been carried out on newly reclaimed land: entire villages with all the necessary utilities have been built.
Cultural life
The outer court of the Temple of Luxor in Thebes, Egypt, with giant statues of King Ramses II.
© 1997; AISA, Archivo Iconográfico, Barcelona, España
In spite of the many ancient civilizations with which it has come into contact, Egypt unquestionably belongs to a sociocultural tradition that is Arabic and Islamic. This tradition remains a constant factor in determining Egyptian views both of itself and of the world.
The story of the cultural development of modern Egypt is, in essence, that of the response of this traditional system to the intrusion into it, at first by conquest and later by the penetration of ideas, of the alien and materially superior civilization of the West. The response covered a broad spectrum—from the rejection of new ideas and reversion to traditionalism through self-examination and reform to an uncritical acceptance of new concepts and the values that went with them. The result has been the emergence of a cultural identity devoid of self-consciousness, which has assimilated much that is new, while remaining distinctively Egyptian. The process is to be seen at work in all branches of contemporary culture.
The state of the arts
The impact of the West is one of the recurring themes in the modern Egyptian novel, as in Tawfiq al-Hakim's 'Usfur min ash-Sharq (“The Bird from the East”) and Yahya Haqqi's novella Qindil Umm Hashim (“The Lamp of Umm Hashim”). A further theme is that of the Egyptian countryside—romantically handled at first, as in Muhammad Husayn Haykal's Zaynab, and later realistically, as in 'Abd al-Rahman ash-Sharqawi's al-Ard (The Land) and al-Fallah (“The Peasant”) and in Yusuf Idris' al-Haram (“The Forbidden”). A Dickensian capacity to catch the colour of life among the urban poor is a characteristic quality of the early and middle work of Egypt's greatest modern novelist, Najib Mahfuz, notably in Zuqaq al-Midaqq (Midaq Alley).
The modern theatre in Egypt is a European importation—the first Arabic-speaking plays were performed in 1870. Two dramatists, both born at the turn of the century, have dominated its development—Mahmud Taymur and Tawfiq al-Hakim. The latter, a versatile and cerebral playwright, has reflected in his themes not only the development of the modern theatre but also, in embryo, the cultural and social history of modern Egypt. The changes in Egyptian society are reflected in the themes adopted by younger dramatists.
There is a relatively long tradition of filmmaking in Egypt going back to World War I, but it was the founding of Misr Studios in 1934 that stimulated the growth of the Arabic-speaking cinema. Modern Egyptian films are shown to audiences throughout the Arab world and are also distributed in Asian and African countries. The industry is both privately and state owned—there are many private film-production companies, as well as the Ministry of Culture's Egyptian General Cinema Corporation.
Contemporary Egyptian music embraces indigenous folk music, traditional Arabic music, and Western-style music. The revival of traditional Arabic music, both vocal and instrumental, owes much to state sponsorship. Popular Arabic music consists of a blend of classical Arabic music, folk songs, and Western music. Muhammad 'Abd al-Wahhab has been one of the leading figures in the development of this genre, as both composer and singer. Umm Kulthum was the leading vocalist not only of Egypt but also of the whole Arab world for almost 50 years. Western-style music has been a familiar component in Egyptian musical culture since the 19th century. Pioneers such as Yusuf Greiss and Abu Bakr Khayrat succeeded in incorporating Arabic elements to give a national colouring to their Western-style compositions.
A return to folklore as a source of inspiration for the arts is a generalized phenomenon in modern Egyptian culture. It has resulted in a revived interest in traditional crafts, in the collection of folk music, and the maintaining, with government sponsorship, of two folk-dance ensembles—the Rida Troupe and the National Folk Dance Ensemble. In the plastic arts the highly original use of local themes is particularly striking. An active school of Egyptian painting and sculpture has emerged.
Cultural institutions
The oldest learned academy in Egypt, the Institut d'Égypte, was founded in 1859, but its antecedents go back to the institute established by Napoleon in 1798. The Academy of the Arabic Language, founded in 1932 and presided over by the veteran educator Taha Husayn, became, in terms of prestige and influence, one of the most important cultural institutions in Egypt. Linked to the Ministry of Culture, it enjoys a large measure of autonomy, guaranteed by its own charter. Also attached to the Ministry of Culture is the Higher Council for Arts, Letters, and the Social Sciences. Intended as a consultative body on cultural matters, the Higher Council is also a means of channeling state patronage.
Learned societies in Egypt support a wide variety of interests—including the physical and natural sciences, medicine, agriculture, the humanities, and the social sciences. Increased government concern with research, especially in science and technology, was reflected in the founding of the National Research Centre, where laboratory work in both pure and applied science began in 1956, and of the Atomic Energy Establishment, in 1957. In addition, there are many specialized research institutes in the country.
Most of the learned societies and research institutes have library collections of their own. In addition to large collections at the universities, the municipalities of Alexandria, al-Mansurah, and Tanta maintain libraries. There is also a central public library in each muhafazah, with branches in small towns and service points in the villages. The Ministry of Culture is responsible for the Egyptian National Library (Dar al-Kutub) and the National Archives, both in Cairo, and the Public Libraries Administration. The Egyptian National Library, which has a large collection of printed materials, is also a centre for the collection and preservation of manuscripts.
The Ministry of Culture is also responsible, through its department of antiquities, for the Egyptian Museum, the Coptic Museum, and the Museum of Islamic Art, all in Cairo; the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria; and for other institutions, including fine-arts museums such as the Mukhtar Museum, the Naji Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, all in Cairo, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Alexandria.
All newspapers and magazines in Egypt are subject to supervision through the government's Supreme Press Council. Daily newspapers include the long-established al-Ahram, published in Cairo, and other Arabic-language papers, together with daily English-language and French-language newspapers. The government owns and operates the Egyptian Radio and Television Corporation, which provides programs in a variety of languages. Cairo is considered to be the largest centre of publishing in the Middle East.
Laila Shukry El Hamamsy
Marsden Jones
Derek Hopwood
Charles Gordon Smith
Macedonian and Ptolemaic Egypt (332–30 BC)
The Macedonian conquest
(Top) Sites associated with Egypt from Predynastic to Byzantine times. (Middle) Inset of the Nile …
In the autumn of 332 BC Alexander the Great invaded Egypt with his mixed army of Macedonians and Greeks and found the Egyptians ready to throw off the oppressive control of the hated Persians. Alexander was welcomed by the Egyptians as a liberator and took the country without a battle. He journeyed to Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert to visit the Oracle of Amon, renowned in the Greek world; it disclosed the information that Alexander was the son of Amon. There may also have been a coronation at the Egyptian capital, Memphis, which, if it occurred, would have placed him firmly in the tradition of the pharaohs; the same purpose may be seen in the later dissemination of the romantic myth that gave him an Egyptian parentage by linking his mother, Olympias, with the last pharaoh, Nectanebo II.
Alexander left Egypt in the spring of 331 BC, dividing the military command between Balacrus, son of Amyntas, and Peucestas, son of Makartatos. The earliest known Greek documentary papyrus, found at Saqqarah in 1973, reveals the sensitivity of the latter to Egyptian religious institutions in a notice that reads: “Order of Peucestas. No-one is to pass. The chamber is that of a priest.” The civil administration was headed by an official with the Persian title of satrap, one Cleomenes of Naukratis. When Alexander died in 323 BC and his generals divided his empire, the position of satrap was claimed by Ptolemy, son of a Macedonian nobleman named Lagus. The senior general Perdiccas, the holder of Alexander's royal seal and prospective regent for Alexander's posthumous son, might well have regretted his failure to take Egypt. He gathered an army and marched from Asia Minor to wrest Egypt from Ptolemy in 321 BC; but Ptolemy had Alexander's corpse, Perdiccas' army was not wholehearted in support, and the Nile crocodiles made a good meal from the flesh of the invaders.
The Ptolemaic dynasty
Until the day when he openly assumed an independent kingship as Ptolemy I Soter, on Nov. 7, 305 BC, Ptolemy used only the title satrap of Egypt, but the great hieroglyphic Satrap stela, which he had inscribed in 311 BC, indicates a degree of self-confidence that transcends his viceregal role. It reads, “I, Ptolemy the satrap, I restore to Horus, the avenger of his father, the lord of Pe and to Buto, the lady of Pe and Dep, the territory of Patanut, from this day forth for ever, with all its villages, all its towns, all its inhabitants, all its fields.” The inscription emphasizes Ptolemy's own role in wresting the land from the Persians (though the epithet of Soter, meaning “Saviour,” resulted not from his actions in Egypt but from the gratitude of the people of Rhodes for his having relieved them from a siege in 315 BC) and links him with Khabbash, who had laid claim to the kingship during the last Persian occupation in about 338 BC.
Egypt was ruled by Ptolemy's descendants until the death of Cleopatra VII on Aug. 12, 30 BC. The kingdom was one of several that emerged in the aftermath of Alexander's death and struggles of his successors. It was the wealthiest, however, and, for much of the next 300 years, the most powerful politically and culturally, and it was the last to fall directly under Roman dominion. In many respects, the character of the Ptolemaic monarchy in Egypt set a style for other Hellenistic kingdoms; this style emerged from the Greeks' and Macedonians' awareness of the need to dominate Egypt, its resources, and its people and at the same time to turn the power of Egypt firmly toward the context of a Mediterranean world that was becoming steadily more Hellenized.
The Ptolemies (305–145 BC)
The first 160 years of the Ptolemaic dynasty are conventionally seen as its most prosperous era. Little is known of the foundations laid in the reign of Ptolemy I Soter (304–282 BC), but the increasing amount of documentary, inscriptional, and archaeological evidence from the reign of his son and successor, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC), shows that the kingdom's administration and economy underwent a thorough reorganization. A remarkable demotic text of the year 258 BC refers to orders for a complete census of the kingdom that was to record the sources of water; the position, quality, and irrigation potential of the land; the state of cultivation; the crops grown; and the extent of priestly and royal landholdings. There were important agricultural innovations in this period. New crops were introduced, and massive irrigation works brought under cultivation a great deal of new land, especially in the Fayyum, where many of the immigrant Greeks were settled.
The Macedonian-Greek character of the monarchy was vigorously preserved. There is no more emphatic sign of this than the growth and importance of the city of Alexandria. It had been founded, on a date traditionally given as April 7, 331 BC, by Alexander the Great on the site of the insignificant Egyptian village of Rakotis in the northwestern Delta, and it ranked as the most important city in the eastern Mediterranean until the foundation of Constantinople in the 4th century AD. The importance of the new Greek city was soon emphasized by contrast to its Egyptian surroundings when the royal capital was transferred, within a few years of Alexander's death, from Memphis to Alexandria. The Ptolemaic court cultivated extravagant luxury in the Greek style in its magnificent and steadily expanding palace complex, which occupied as much as a third of the city by the early Roman period. Its grandeur was emphasized in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus by the foundation of a quadrennial festival, the Ptolemaieia, which was intended to enjoy a status equal to that of the Olympic Games. The festival was marked by a procession of amazingly elaborate and ingeniously constructed floats, with scenarios illustrating Greek religious cults.
Ptolemy II gave the dynasty another distinctive feature when he married his full sister, Arsinoe II, one of the most powerful and remarkable women of the Hellenistic age. They became, in effect, co-rulers, and both took the epithet Philadelphus (“Brother-Loving” and “Sister-Loving”). The practice of consanguineous marriage was followed by most of their successors and imitated by ordinary Egyptians too, even though it had not been a standard practice in the pharaonic royal houses and had been unknown in the rest of the native Egyptian population. Arsinoe played a prominent role in the formation of royal policy. She was displayed on the coinage and was eventually worshiped, perhaps even before her death, in the distinctively Greek style of ruler cult that developed in this reign.
From the first phase of the wars of Alexander's successors the Ptolemies had harboured imperial ambitions. Ptolemy I won control of Cyprus and Cyrene and quarreled with his neighbour over control of Palestine. In the course of the 3rd century a powerful Ptolemaic empire developed, which, for much of the period, laid claim to sovereignty in the Levant, in many of the cities of the western and southern coast of Asia Minor, in some of the Aegean islands, and in a handful of towns in Thrace, as well as in Cyprus and Cyrene. Family connections and dynastic alliances, especially between the Ptolemies and the neighbouring Seleucids, played a very important role in these imperialistic ambitions. Such links were far from able to preserve harmony between the royal houses (between 274 and 200 BC five wars were fought with the Seleucids over possession of territory in Syria and the Levant), but they did keep the ruling houses relatively compact, interconnected, and more true to their Macedonian-Greek origins.
When Ptolemy II Philadelphus died in 246 BC, he left a prosperous kingdom to his successor, Ptolemy III Euergetes (246–222 BC). His reign saw a very successful campaign against the Seleucids in Syria, occasioned by the murder of Euergetes' sister, Berenice, who had been married to the Seleucid Antiochus II. To avenge Berenice, Euergetes marched into Syria, where he won a great victory. He gained popularity at home by recapturing statues of Egyptian gods originally taken by the Persians. The decree promulgated at Canopus in the Delta on March 4, 238 BC, attests both this event and the many great benefactions conferred on Egyptian temples throughout the land. It was during Euergetes' reign, for instance, that the rebuilding of the great Temple of Horus at Idfu (Apollinopolis Magna) was begun.
Euergetes was succeeded by his son Ptolemy IV Philopator (222–205 BC), whom the Greek historians portray as a weak and corrupt ruler, dominated by a powerful circle of Alexandrian Greek courtiers. The reign was notable for another serious conflict with the Seleucids, which ended in 217 BC in a great Ptolemaic victory at Raphia in southern Palestine. The battle is notable for the fact that large numbers of native Egyptian soldiers fought alongside the Macedonian and Greek contingents. Events surrounding the death of Philopator and the succession of the youthful Ptolemy V Epiphanes (205–180 BC) are obscured by court intrigue. Before Epiphanes had completed his first decade of rule, serious difficulties arose. Native revolts in the south, which had been sporadic in the second half of the 3rd century, became serious and weakened the hold of the monarch on a vital part of the kingdom. These revolts, which produced native claimants to the kingship, are generally attributed to the native Egyptians' realization, after their contribution to the victory at Raphia, of their potential power. Trouble continued to break out for several more decades. By about 196 a great portion of the Ptolemaic overseas empire had been permanently lost (though there may have been a brief revival in the Aegean islands in about 165–145 BC). To shore up and advertise the strength of the ruling house at home and abroad, the administration adopted a series of grandiloquent honorific titles for its officers. To conciliate Egyptian feelings, a religious synod that met in 196 to crown Epiphanes at Memphis (the first occasion on which a Ptolemy is certainly known to have been crowned at the traditional capital) decreed extensive privileges for the Egyptian temples, as recorded on the Rosetta Stone.
The reign of Ptolemy VI Philometor (180–145 BC), a man of pious and magnanimous character, was marked by renewed conflict with the Seleucids after the death of his mother, Cleopatra I, in 176 BC. In 170 BC Antiochus IV of Syria invaded Egypt and established a protectorate; in 168 BC he returned, accepted coronation at Memphis, and installed a Seleucid governor. But he had failed to reckon with more powerful interests: those of Rome. In the summer of 168 BC a Roman ambassador, Popillius Laenas, arrived at Antiochus' headquarters near Pelusium in the Delta and staged an awesome display of Roman power. He ordered Antiochus to withdraw from Egypt. Antiochus asked for time to consult his advisers. Laenas drew a circle around the King with his stick and told him to answer before he stepped out of the circle. Only one answer was possible, and by the end of July Antiochus had left Egypt. Philometor's reign was further troubled by rivalry with his brother, later Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II Physcon. The solution, devised under Roman advice, was to remove Physcon to Cyrene, where he remained until Philometor died in 145 BC; but it is noteworthy that in 155 BC Physcon took the step of bequeathing the kingdom of Cyrene to the Romans in the event of his untimely death.
Dynastic strife and decline (145–30 BC)
Physcon was able to rule in Egypt until 116 BC with his sister Cleopatra II (except for a period in 131–130 BC when she was in revolt) and her daughter Cleopatra III. His reign was marked by generous benefactions to the Egyptian temples, but he was detested as a tyrant by the Greeks, and the historical accounts of the reign emphasize his stormy relations with the Alexandrian populace.
During the last century of Ptolemaic rule, Egypt's independence was exercised under Rome's protection and at Rome's discretion. For much of the period Rome was content to support a dynasty that had no overseas possession except Cyprus after 96 BC (the year in which Cyrene was bequeathed to Rome by Ptolemy Apion) and no ambitions threatening Roman interests or security. After a series of brief and unstable reigns, Ptolemy XII Auletes acceded to the throne in 80 BC. He maintained his hold for 30 years, despite the attractions that Egypt's legendary wealth held for avaricious Roman politicians. In fact, Auletes had to flee Egypt in 58 BC and was restored by Pompey's friend Gabinius in 55 BC, no doubt after spending so much in bribes that he had to bring back Rabirius Postumus, one of his Roman creditors, to Egypt with him to manage his financial affairs.
In 52 BC, the year before his death, Auletes associated with himself on the throne his daughter Cleopatra VII and his elder son Ptolemy XIII (who died in 47 BC). The reign of Cleopatra was that of a vigorous and exceptionally able queen who was ambitious, among other things, to revive the prestige of the dynasty by cultivating influence with powerful Roman commanders and using their capacity to aggrandize Roman clients and allies. Julius Caesar pursued Pompey to Egypt in 48 BC. After learning of Pompey's murder at the hands of Egyptian courtiers, Caesar stayed long enough to enjoy a sightseeing tour up the Nile in the Queen's company in the summer of 47 BC. When he left for Rome, Cleopatra was pregnant with a child she claimed was Caesar's. The child, a son, was named Caesarion (“Little Caesar”). Cleopatra and Caesarion later followed Caesar back to Rome but, after his assassination in 44 BC, they returned hurriedly to Egypt and she tried for a while to play a neutral role in the struggles between the Roman generals and their factions.
Her long liaison with Mark Antony began when she visited him at Tarsus in 41 BC and he returned to Egypt with her. Between 36 and 30 BC the famous romance between the Roman general and the eastern queen was exploited to great effect by Antony's political rival Octavian. By 34 BC Caesarion was officially co-ruler with Cleopatra, but his rule clearly was an attempt to exploit the popularity of Caesar's memory. In the autumn Cleopatra and Antony staged an extravagant display in which they made grandiose dispositions of territory in the east to their children, Alexander Helios, Ptolemy, and Cleopatra Selene. Cleopatra and Antony were portrayed to the Roman public as posing for artists in the guise of Dionysus and Isis or whiling away their evenings in rowdy and decadent banquets that kept the citizens of Alexandria awake all night. But this propaganda war was merely the prelude to armed conflict, and the issue was decided in September 31 BC in a naval battle at Actium in western Greece. When the battle was at its height Cleopatra and her squadron withdrew, and Antony eventually followed suit. They fled to Alexandria but could do little more than await the arrival of the victorious Octavian 10 months later. Alexandria was captured and Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide—he by falling on his sword, she probably by the bite of an asp—in August of 30 BC. It is reported that when Octavian reached the city he visited and touched the preserved corpse of Alexander the Great, causing a piece of the nose to fall off. He refused to gaze upon the remains of the Ptolemies, saying “I wished to see a king, not corpses.”
Government and conditions under the Ptolemies
The changes brought to Egypt by the Ptolemies were momentous; the land's resources were harnessed with unparalleled efficiency and the result was that it became the wealthiest of the Hellenistic kingdoms. Land under cultivation was increased, new crops were introduced (especially important was the introduction of naked tetraploid wheat, triticum durum, to replace the traditional husked emmer, triticum dicoccum). The population, estimated at perhaps 3,000,000–4,000,000 in the Late Dynastic Period, may have more than doubled by the early Roman period to a figure of 7,500,000 or 8,000,000, a level not reached again until the late 19th century. Some of the increase was due to immigration; particularly during the 2nd and 3rd centuries many settlers were attracted from the cities of Asia Minor and the Greek islands, as well as large numbers of Jews from Palestine. The flow may have decreased later in the Ptolemaic period, and it is often suggested, on slender evidence, that there was a serious decline in prosperity in the 1st century BC. If so, there may have been some reversal of this trend under Cleopatra VII.
Administration
The foundation of the prosperity was the governmental system devised to exploit the country's economic resources. Directly below the monarch were a handful of powerful officials whose competence extended over the entire land: a chief finance minister, a chief accountant, and a chancery of ministers in charge of records, letters, and decrees. A level below them lay the broadening base of a pyramid of subordinate officials with competence in limited areas, which extended down to the chief administrator of each individual village (komarches). Between the chief ministers and the village officials stood those such as the nome-steward (oikonomos) and strategoi, whose competence extended over one of the more than 30 nomes of Egypt, the long-established geographic divisions. In theory this bureaucracy could regulate and control the economic activities of every subject in the land, its smooth operation guaranteed by the multiplicity of officials capable of checking each upon the other. In practice, it is difficult to see a rigid civil-service mentality at work, involving clear demarcation of departments; specific functions might well have been performed by different officials according to local need and the availability of a person competent to take appropriate action.
By the same token, rigid lines of separation between military and civil, legal and administrative matters are difficult to perceive. The same official might perform duties in one or all of these areas, and the law in particular regulated every activity to an extent that the use of the terms legal and judicial tends to hide. The military was inevitably integrated into civilian life because its soldiers were also farmers who enjoyed royal grants of land, either as Greek cleruchs (holders of allotments) with higher status and generous grants, or as native Egypt machimoi with small plots. Interlocking judiciary institutions, in the form of Greek and Egyptian courts (chrematistai and laokritai), provided the means for Greeks and Egyptians to regulate their legal relationships according to the language in which they conducted their business. The bureaucratic power was heavily weighted in favour of the Greek speakers, the dominant elite. Egyptians were nevertheless able to obtain official posts in the bureaucracy, gradually infiltrating to the highest levels, but in order to do so they had to Hellenize.
Economy
The basis of Egypt's legendary wealth was the highly productive land, which technically remained in royal ownership. A considerable portion was kept under the control of temples, and the remainder was leased out on a theoretically revocable basis to tenant-farmers. A portion also was available to be granted as gifts to leading courtiers; one of these was Apollonius, the finance minister of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who had an estate of 10,000 arourae (about 6,500 acres) at Philadelphia in the Fayyum. Tenants and beneficiaries were able to behave very much as if these leases and grants were private property. The revenues in cash and kind were enormous, and royal control extended to the manufacture and marketing of almost all important products, including papyrus, oil, linen, and beer. An extraordinarily detailed set of revenue laws, promulgated under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, laid down rules for the way in which officials were to monitor the production of such commodities. In fact, the Ptolemaic economy was very much a mixture of direct royal ownership and exploitation by private enterprise under regulated conditions.
One fundamental and far-reaching Ptolemaic innovation was the systematic monetarization of the economy. This too the monarchy controlled from top to bottom by operating a closed monetary system, which permitted only the royal coinage to circulate within Egypt. A sophisticated banking system underpinned this practice, operating again with a mixture of direct royal control and private enterprise and handling both private financial transactions and those that directed money into and out of the royal coffers. One important concomitant of this change was an enormous increase in the volume of trade, both within Egypt and abroad, which eventually reached its climax under the peaceful conditions of Roman rule. Here the position and role of Alexandria as the major port and trading entrepôt was crucial: the city handled a great volume of Egypt's domestic produce, as well as the import and export of luxury goods to and from the East and the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. It developed its own importance as an artistic centre, the products of which found ready markets throughout the Mediterranean. Alexandrian glassware and jewelry were particularly fine; Greek-style sculpture of the late Ptolemaic period shows especial excellence; and it is likely that the city was also the major production centre for high-quality mosaic work.
Religion
The Ptolemies were powerful supporters of the native Egyptian religious foundations, the economic and political power of which was, however, carefully controlled. A great deal of the building and restoration work in many of the most important Egyptian temples is Ptolemaic, particularly from the period of about 150–50 BC, and the monarchs appear on temple reliefs in the traditional forms of the Egyptian kings. The native traditions persisted in village temples and local cults, many having particular associations with species of sacred animals or birds. At the same time, the Greeks created their own identifications of Egyptian deities, identifying Amon with Zeus, Horus with Apollo, Ptah with Hephaestus, and so on. They also gave some deities, such as Isis, a more universal significance that ultimately resulted in the spread of her mystery cult throughout the Mediterranean world. The impact of the Greeks is most obvious in two phenomena. One is the formalized royal cult of Alexander and the Ptolemies, which evidently served both a political and a religious purpose. The other is the creation of the cult of Sarapis, which at first was confined to Alexandria but soon became universal. The god was represented as a Hellenized deity and the form of cult is Greek; but its essence is the old Egyptian notion that the sacred Apis bull merged its divinity in some way with the god Osiris when it died.
Culture
The continuing vitality of the native Egyptian artistic tradition is clearly and abundantly expressed in the temple architecture and the sculpture of the Ptolemaic period. The Egyptian language continued in use in its hieroglyphic and demotic forms until late in the Roman period, and it survived through the Byzantine period and beyond in the form of Coptic. The Egyptian literary tradition flourished vigorously in the Ptolemaic period and produced a large number of works in demotic. The genre most commonly represented is the romantic tale, exemplified by several story cycles, which are typically set in the native, Pharaonic milieu and involve the gods, royal figures, magic, romance, and the trials and combats of heroes. Another important category is the Instruction Text, the best known of the period being that of Ankhsheshonq, which consists of a list of moralizing maxims, composed, as the story goes, when Ankhsheshonq was imprisoned for having failed to inform the pharaoh of an assassination plot. Another example, known as Papyrus Insinger, is a more narrowly moralizing text. But the arrival of a Greek-speaking elite had an enormous impact on cultural patterns. The Egyptian story cycles were probably affected by Greek influence; literary and technical works were translated into Greek; and under royal patronage an Egyptian priest named Manetho of Sebennytos wrote an account of the kings of Egypt, in Greek. Most striking is the diffusion of the works of the poets and playwrights of classical Greece among the literate Greeks in the towns and villages of the Nile Valley.
Thus there are clear signs of the existence of two interacting but distinct cultural traditions in Ptolemaic Egypt. This was certainly reflected in a broader social context. The written sources offer little direct evidence of racial discrimination by Greeks against Egyptians, but Greek and Egyptian consciousness of the Greeks' social and economic superiority comes through strongly from time to time; intermarriage was one means, though not the only one, by which Egyptians could better their status and Hellenize. Many native Egyptians learned to speak Greek, some to write it as well; some even went so far as to adopt Greek names in an attempt to assimilate themselves to the elite group.
Alexandria occupied a unique place in the history of literature, ideas, scholarship, and science for almost a millennium after the death of its founder. Under the royal patronage of the Ptolemies, and in an environment almost oblivious to its Egyptian surroundings, Greek culture was preserved and developed. Early in the Ptolemaic period, probably in the reign of Ptolemy I Soter, the Museum (“Shrine of the Muses”) was established within the palace complex. Strabo, who saw it early in the Roman period, described it as having a covered walk, an arcade with recesses and seats, and a large house containing the dining hall of the members of the Museum, who lived a communal existence. The Great Library of Alexandria (together with its offshoot in the Sarapeum) was indispensable to the functioning of the scholarly community in the Museum. Books were collected voraciously under the Ptolemies, and at its height the library's collection probably numbered close to 500,000 papyrus rolls, most of them containing more than one work.
The major poets of the Hellenistic period, Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius of Rhodes, all took up residence and wrote there. Scholarship flourished, preserving and ordering the manuscript traditions of much of the classical literature from Homer onward. Librarian-scholars such as Aristophanes of Byzantium and his pupil Aristarchus made critical editions and wrote commentaries and works on grammar. Also notable was the cultural influence of Alexandria's Jewish community, which is inferred from the fact that the Pentateuch was first translated into Greek at Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period. One by-product of this kind of activity was that Alexandria became the centre of the book trade, and the works of the classical authors were copied there and diffused among a literate Greek readership scattered in the towns and villages of the Nile Valley.
The Alexandrian achievement in scientific fields was also enormous. Great advances were made in pure mathematics, mechanics, physics, geography, and medicine. Euclid worked in Alexandria in about 300 BC and achieved the systematization of the whole existing corpus of mathematical knowledge and the development of the method of proof by deduction from axioms. Archimedes was there in the 3rd century BC and is said to have invented the Archimedean screw when he was in Egypt; Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference and was the first to attempt a map of the world based on a system of lines of latitude and longitude; and the school of medicine founded in the Ptolemaic period retained its leading reputation into the Byzantine era. Late in the Ptolemaic period Alexandria began to develop as a great centre of Greek philosophical studies as well. In fact, there was no field of literary, intellectual, or scientific activity to which Ptolemaic Alexandria failed to make an important contribution.
Alan Edouard Samuel
Alan K. Bowman
Roman and Byzantine Egypt (30 BC–AD 642)
Egypt as a province of Rome
(Top) Sites associated with Egypt from Predynastic to Byzantine times. (Middle) Inset of the Nile …
“I added Egypt to the Empire of the Roman people.” With these words the emperor Augustus (as Octavian was known from 27 BC) summarized the subjection of Cleopatra's kingdom in the great inscription that records his achievements. The province was to be governed by a viceroy, a prefect with the status of a Roman knight (eques) who was directly responsible to the emperor. The first viceroy was the Roman poet and soldier Cornelius Gallus, who boasted too vaingloriously of his military achievements in the province and paid for it first with his position and then with his life. Roman senators were not allowed to enter Egypt without the emperor's permission, because this wealthiest of provinces could be held militarily by a very small force; and the threat implicit in an embargo on the export of grain supplies, vital to the provisioning of the city of Rome and its populace, was obvious. Internal security was guaranteed by the presence of three Roman legions (later reduced to two), each about 6,000 strong, and several cohorts of auxiliaries. In the first decade of Roman rule the spirit of Augustan imperialism looked farther afield, attempting expansion to the east and to the south. An expedition to Arabia by the prefect Aelius Gallus in about 26–25 BC was undermined by the treachery of the Nabataean Syllaeus, who led the Roman fleet astray in uncharted waters. Arabia was to remain an independent though friendly client of Rome until AD 106, when the emperor Trajan (ruled AD 98–117) annexed it, making it possible to reopen Ptolemy II's canal from the Nile to the head of the Gulf of Suez. To the south the Meroitic people beyond the First Cataract had taken advantage of Gallus' preoccupation with Arabia and mounted an attack on the Thebaid. The next Roman prefect, Petronius, led two expeditions into the Meroitic kingdom (c. 24–22 BC), captured several towns, forced the submission of the formidable queen, who was characterized by Roman writers as “the one-eyed Queen Candace,” and left a Roman garrison at Primis (Qasr Ibrim). But thoughts of maintaining a permanent presence in Lower Nubia were soon abandoned, and within a year or two the limits of Roman occupation had been set at Hiera Sykaminos, some 50 miles south of the First Cataract. The mixed character of the region is indicated, however, by the continuing popularity of the goddess Isis among the people of Meroe and by the Roman emperor Augustus' foundation of a temple at Kalabsha dedicated to the local god Mandulis.
Egypt achieved its greatest prosperity under the shadow of the Roman peace which, in effect, depoliticized it. Roman emperors or members of their families visited Egypt—Tiberius' nephew and adopted son, Germanicus; Vespasian and his elder son, Titus; Hadrian; Septimius Severus; Diocletian—to see the famous sights, receive the acclamations of the Alexandrian populace, attempt to ensure the loyalty of the volatile subjects, or initiate administrative reform. Occasionally its potential as a power base was realized. Vespasian, the most successful of the imperial aspirants in the “Year of the Four Emperors,” was first proclaimed at Alexandria on July 1, AD 69, in a maneuver contrived by the prefect of Egypt, Tiberius Julius Alexander. Others were less successful. Avidius Cassius, the son of a former prefect of Egypt, revolted against Marcus Aurelius in AD 175, stimulated by false rumours of Marcus' death, but his attempted usurpation lasted only three months. For several months in AD 297/298 Egypt was under the dominion of a mysterious usurper named Lucius Domitius Domitianus. The emperor Diocletian was present at the final capitulation of Alexandria after an eight-month siege and swore to take revenge by slaughtering the populace until the river of blood reached his horse's knees; the threat was mitigated when his mount stumbled as he rode into the city. In gratitude, the citizens of Alexandria erected a statue of the horse.
The only extended period during the turbulent 3rd century AD in which Egypt was lost to the central imperial authority was 270–272, when it fell into the hands of the ruling dynasty of the Syrian city of Palmyra. Fortunately for Rome, the military strength of Palmyra proved to be the major obstacle to the overrunning of the Eastern Empire by the powerful Sasanian monarchy of Persia.
Internal threats to security were not uncommon but normally were dissipated without major damage to imperial control. These included rioting between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria in the reign of Caligula (Gaius Caesar Germanicus; ruled AD 37–41); a serious Jewish revolt under Trajan (ruled AD 98–117); a revolt in the Delta in AD 172 that was quelled by Avidius Cassius; and a revolt centred on the town of Coptos (Qift) in AD 293/294 that was put down by Galerius, Diocletian's imperial colleague.
Administration and economy under Rome
The Romans introduced important changes in the administrative system, aimed at achieving a high level of efficiency and maximizing revenue. The duties of the prefect of Egypt combined responsibility for military security through command of the legions and cohorts, for the organization of finance and taxation, and for the administration of justice. This involved a vast mass of detailed paperwork: one document of AD 211 notes that in a period of three days 1,804 petitions were handed into the prefect's office. But the prefect was assisted by a hierarchy of subordinate equestrian officials with expertise in particular areas. There were three or four epistrategoi in charge of regional subdivisions; special officers were in charge of the emperors' private account, the administration of justice, religious institutions, and so on. Subordinate to them were the local officials in the nomes (strategoi and royal scribes) and finally the authorities in the towns and villages.
It was in these growing towns that the Romans made the most far-reaching changes in administration. They introduced colleges of magistrates and officials who were to be responsible for running the internal affairs of their own communities on a theoretically autonomous basis and, at the same time, were to guarantee the collection and payment of tax quotas to the central government. This was backed up by the development of a range of “liturgies,” compulsory public services that were imposed on individuals according to rank and property to ensure the financing and upkeep of local facilities. These institutions were the Egyptian counterpart of the councils and magistrates that oversaw the Greek cities in the eastern Roman provinces. They had been ubiquitous in other Hellenistic kingdoms, but in Ptolemaic Egypt they had existed only in the so-called Greek cities (Alexandria, Ptolemais in Upper Egypt, Naukratis, and later Antinoöpolis, founded by Hadrian in AD 130). Alexandria lost the right to have a council, probably in the Ptolemaic period. When it recovered its right in AD 200 the privilege was diluted by being extended to the nome capitals (metropoleis) as well. This extension of privilege represented an attempt to shift more of the burden and expense of administration onto the local propertied classes, but it was eventually to prove too heavy. The consequences were the impoverishment of many of the councillors and their families and serious problems in administration that led to an increasing degree of central government interference and, eventually, more direct control.
The economic resources that this administration existed to exploit had not changed since the Ptolemaic period, but the development of a much more complex and sophisticated taxation system was a hallmark of Roman rule. Taxes in both cash and kind were assessed on land, and a bewildering variety of small taxes in cash, as well as customs dues and the like, was collected by appointed officials. A massive amount of Egypt's grain was shipped downriver both to feed the population of Alexandria and for export to Rome. Despite frequent complaints of oppression and extortion from the taxpayers, it is not obvious that official tax rates were very high. In fact the Roman government had actively encouraged the privatization of land and the increase of private enterprise in manufacture, commerce, and trade, and low tax rates favoured private owners and entrepreneurs. The poorer people gained their livelihood as tenants of state-owned land or of property belonging to the emperor or to wealthy private landlords, and they were relatively much more heavily burdened by rentals, which tended to remain at a fairly high level.
Overall, the degree of monetarization and complexity in the economy, even at the village level, was intense. Goods were moved around and exchanged through the medium of coin on a large scale and, in the towns and the larger villages, a high level of industrial and commercial activity developed in close conjunction with the exploitation of the predominant agricultural base. The volume of trade, both internal and external, reached its peak in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. But by the end of the 3rd century AD, major problems were evident. A series of debasements of the imperial currency had undermined confidence in the coinage, and even the government itself was contributing to this by demanding more and more irregular tax payments in kind, which it channeled directly to the main consumers, the army personnel. Local administration by the councils was careless, recalcitrant, and inefficient; the evident need for firm and purposeful reform had to be squarely faced in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine.
Society, religion, and culture
One of the more noticeable effects of Roman rule was the clearer tendency to classification and social control of the populace. Thus, despite many years of intermarriage between Greeks and Egyptians, lists drawn up in AD 4/5 established the right of certain families to class themselves as Greek by descent and to claim privileges attaching to their status as members of an urban aristocracy, known as the gymnasial class. Members of this group were entitled to lower rates of poll tax, subsidized or free distributions of food, and maintenance at the public expense when they grew old. If they or their descendants were upwardly mobile, they might gain Alexandrian citizenship, Roman citizenship, or even equestrian status, with correspondingly greater prestige and privileges. The preservation of such distinctions was implicit in the spread of Roman law and was reinforced by elaborate codes of social and fiscal regulations such as the “Rule-Book of the Emperors' Special Account.” The “Rule-Book” prescribed conditions under which people of different status might marry, for instance, or bequeath property and fixed fines, confiscations, and other penalties for transgression. When an edict of the emperor Caracalla conferred Roman citizenship on practically all of the subjects of the empire in AD 212, the distinction between citizens and noncitizens became meaningless; but it was gradually replaced by an equally important distinction between honestiores and humiliores (meaning, roughly, upper and lower classes), groups that, among other distinctions, were subjected to different penalities in law.
Naturally, it was the Greek-speaking elite that continued to dictate the visibly dominant cultural pattern, though Egyptian culture was not moribund or insignificant; one proof of its continued survival can be seen in its reemergent importance in the context of Coptic Christianity in the Byzantine period. An important reminder of the mixing of the traditions comes from a family of Panopolis in the 4th century, whose members included both teachers of Greek oratory and priests in Egyptian cult. The towns and villages of the Nile Valley have preserved thousands of papyri that show what the literate Greeks were reading: the poems of Homer and the lyric poets, works of the classical Greek tragedians, and comedies of Menander, for example. The pervasiveness of the Greek literary tradition is strikingly demonstrated by evidence left by an obscure and anonymous clerk at the Fayyum village of Karanis in the 2nd century AD. In copying out a long list of taxpayers, the clerk translated an Egyptian name in the list by an extremely rare Greek word that he could only have known from having read the Alexandrian Hellenistic poet Callimachus; he must have understood the etymology of the Egyptian name as well.
Alexandria continued to develop as a spectacularly beautiful city and to foster Greek culture and intellectual pursuits, though the great days of Ptolemaic court patronage of literary figures had passed. But the flourishing interest in philosophy, particularly Platonic, had important effects. The great Jewish philosopher and theologian of the 1st century, Philo of Alexandria, brought a training in Greek philosophy to bear on his commentaries on the Old Testament. This anticipates by a hundred years the period after the virtual annihilation of the great Jewish community of Alexandria in the revolt of AD 115–117, when the city was the intellectual crucible in which Christianity developed a theology that took it away from the influence of the Jewish exegetical tradition and toward that of Greek philosophical ideas. There the foundations were laid for the teaching of the heads of the Christian catechetical school, such as Clement of Alexandria. And in the 3rd century there was the vital textual and theological work of Origen, the greatest of the Christian Neoplatonists, without which there would hardly have been a coherent New Testament tradition at all.
Outside the Greek ambience of Alexandria, traditional Egyptian religious institutions continued to flourish in the towns and villages; but the temples were reduced to financial dependence on a state subvention (syntaxis) and they became subject to stringent control by secular bureaucrats. Nevertheless, like the Ptolemies before them, Roman emperors appear in the traditional form as Egyptian kings on temple reliefs until the middle of the 3rd century; and five professional hieroglyph cutters were still employed at the town of Oxyrhynchus in the 2nd century. The animal cults continued to flourish, despite Augustus' famous sneer that he was accustomed to worship gods, not cattle. As late as the reign of Diocletian (AD 285–305) religious stelae preserved the fiction that in the cults of sacred bulls (best known at Memphis and at Hermonthis), the successor of a dead bull was “installed” by the monarch. Differences between cults of the Greek type and the native Egyptian cults were still very marked, in the temple architecture as in the status of the priests. Priests of Egyptian cult formed, in effect, a caste distinguished by their special clothing, whereas priestly offices in Greek cult were much more like magistracies and tended to be held by local magnates. Cult of Roman emperors, living and dead, became universal after 30 BC, but its impact is most clearly to be seen in the foundations of Caesarea (Temples of Caesar) and in religious institutions of Greek type, where divine emperors were associated with the resident deities.
One development that did have an important effect on this pagan religious amalgam, though it was not decisive until the 4th century, was the arrival of Christianity. The tradition of the foundation of the church of Alexandria by St. Mark cannot be substantiated, but a fragment of a text of the Gospel According to John provides concrete evidence of Christianity in the Nile Valley in the second quarter of the 2nd century AD. Inasmuch as Christianity remained illegal and subject to persecution until the early 4th century, Christians were reluctant to advertise themselves as such, and it is therefore difficult to know how numerous they were, especially because later pro-Christian sources may often be suspected of exaggerating the zeal and the numbers of the early Christian martyrs. But several papyri survive of the libelli submitted in the first official state-sponsored persecution of Christians, under the emperor Decius (ruled 249–251): these were certificates in which people swore that they had performed sacrifices to pagan gods in order to prove that they were not Christians. By the 290s, a decade or so before the great persecution of Diocletian, a list of buildings in the sizeable town of Oxyrhynchus, some 125 miles south of the apex of the delta, included two Christian churches, probably of the house-chapel type.
Egypt's role in the Byzantine Empire
Diocletian was the last reigning Roman emperor to visit Egypt, in AD 302. Within about 10 years of his visit, the persecution of Christians ceased. The end of persecution had such far-reaching effects that from this point on it is necessary to think of the history of Egypt in a very different framework. No single point can be identified as the watershed between the Roman and Byzantine periods, as the divide between the peace, culture, and prosperity of the Principate and the darker age of the Dominate, supposedly characterized by a more oppressive state machinery in the throes of decline and fall. The crucial changes occurred in the last decade of the 3rd century and the first three decades of the 4th. With the end of persecution of Christians came the restoration of the property of the church. In 313 a new system of calculating and collecting taxes was introduced, with 15-year tax cycles, called indictions, inaugurated retrospectively from the year 312. Many other important administrative changes had already taken place. In 296 the separation of the Egyptian coinage from that of the rest of the empire had come to an end when the Alexandrian mint stopped producing its tetradrachmas, which had been the basis of the closed currency system.
One other event that had an enormous effect on the political history of Egypt was the founding of Constantinople on May 11, 330. First, Constantinople was established as an imperial capital and an eastern counterpart to Rome itself, thus undermining Alexandria's traditional position as the first city of the Greek-speaking East. Second, it diverted the resources of Egypt away from Rome and the West. Henceforth, part of the surplus of the Egyptian grain supply, which was put at 8,000,000 artabs (about 300,000,000 litres) of wheat in an edict of the emperor Justinian of about 537 or 538, went to feed the growing population of Constantinople, and this created an important political and economic link. The cumulative effect of these changes was to knit Egypt more uniformly into the structure of the empire and to give it, once again, a central role in the political history of the Mediterranean world.
The key to understanding the importance of Egypt in this period lies in seeing how the Christian Church came rapidly to dominate secular as well as religious institutions and to acquire a powerful interest and role in every political issue. The corollary of this was that the head of the Egyptian Church, the patriarch of Alexandria, became the most influential figure within Egypt, as well as the person who could give the Egyptian clergy a powerful voice in the councils of the Eastern Church. During the course of the 4th century, Egypt was divided for administrative purposes into a number of smaller units but the patriarchy was not, and its power thus far outweighed that of any local administrative official. Only the governors of groups of provinces (vicarii of dioceses) were equivalent, the praetorian prefects and emperors superior; and when a patriarch of Alexandria was given civil authority as well, as happened in the case of Cyrus, the last patriarch under Byzantine rule, the combination was very powerful indeed.
The turbulent history of Egypt in the Byzantine period can largely be understood in terms of the struggles of the successive (or, after AD 570, coexisting) patriarchs of Alexandria to maintain their position both within their patriarchy and outside it in relation to Constantinople. What linked Egypt and the rest of the Eastern Empire was the way in which the imperial authorities, when strong (as, for instance, in the reign of Justinian), tried to control the Egyptian Church from Constantinople, while at the same time assuring the capital's food supply and, as often as not, waging wars to keep their empire intact. Conversely, when weak they failed to control the church. For the patriarchs of Alexandria, it proved impossible to secure the approval of the imperial authorities in Constantinople and at the same time maintain the support of their power base in Egypt. The two made quite different demands, and the ultimate result was a social, political, and cultural gulf between Alexandria and the rest of Egypt, and between Hellenism and native Egyptian culture, which found a powerful new means of expression in Coptic Christianity. The gulf was made more emphatic after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 established the official doctrine that Christ was to be seen as existing in two natures, inseparably united. The council's decision in effect sent the Egyptian Coptic (now Coptic Orthodox) Church off on its own path of Monophysitism, which centred around a firm insistence on the singularity of the nature of Christ.
Despite the debilitating effect of internal quarrels between rival churchmen, and despite the threats posed by the hostile tribes of Blemmyes and Nubade in the south (until their conversion to Christianity in the mid-6th century), emperors of Byzantium still could be threatened by the strength of Egypt if it were properly harnessed. The last striking example is the case of the emperor Phocas, a tyrant who was brought down in 609 or 610. Nicetas, the general of the future emperor Heraclius, made for Alexandria from Cyrene, intending to use Egypt as his power base and cut off Constantinople's grain supply. By the spring of 610 Nicetas' struggle with Bonosus, the general of Phocas, was won, and the fall of the tyrant duly followed.
The difficulty of defending Egypt from a power base in Constantinople was forcefully illustrated during the last three decades of Byzantine rule. First, the old enemy, the Persians, advanced to the Nile Delta and captured Alexandria. Their occupation was completed early in 619 and continued until 628, when Persia and Byzantium agreed to a peace treaty and the Persians withdrew. This had been a decade of violent hostility to the Egyptian Coptic Christians; among other oppressive measures, the Persians are said to have refused to allow the normal ordination of bishops and to have massacred hundreds of monks in their cave monasteries. The Persian withdrawal hardly heralded the return of peace to Egypt.
In Arabia events were taking place that would soon bring momentous changes for Egypt. These were triggered by the flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina and by his declaration in AD 632 of a holy Islamic war against Byzantium. Ten years later, by Sept. 29, 642, the Arab general 'Amr ibn al-'As was able to march into Alexandria, and the Arab conquest of Egypt, which had begun with an invasion three years earlier, ended in peaceful capitulation. The invasion itself had been preceded by several years of vicious persecution of Coptic Christians by the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, Cyrus, and it was he who is said to have betrayed Egypt to the forces of Islam.
The Islamic conquest was not bloodless. There was desultory fighting at first in the eastern Delta, then the Fayyum was lost in battle in 640, and a great battle took place at Heliopolis (now a suburb of Cairo) in July 640 in which 15,000 Arabs engaged 20,000 Egyptian defenders. The storming and capture of Trajan's old fortess at Babylon (on the site of the present-day quarter called Old Cairo) on April 6, 641, was crucial. By September 14 Cyrus, who had been recalled from Egypt 10 months earlier by the emperor Heraclius, was back with authority to conclude a peace. Byzantium signed Egypt away on Nov. 8, 641, with provision for an 11-month armistice to allow ratification of the treaty of surrender by the emperor and the caliph. In December 641 heavily laden ships were dispatched to carry Egypt's wealth to its new masters. Nine months later the last remnants of Byzantine forces had left Egypt in ships bound for Cyprus, Rhodes, and Constantinople, and 'Amr ibn al-'As had taken Alexandria in the name of the caliph. The new domination by the theocratic Islamic caliphate was more strikingly different than anything that had happened in Egypt since the arrival of Alexander the Great almost a thousand years earlier.
Byzantine government of Egypt
The reforms of the early 4th century had established the basis for another 250 years of comparative prosperity in Egypt, at a cost of perhaps greater rigidity and more oppressive state control. Egypt was subdivided for administrative purposes into a number of smaller provinces, and separate civil and military officials were established (the praeses and the dux). By the middle of the 6th century the emperor Justinian was eventually forced to recognize the failure of this policy and to combine civil and military power in the hands of the dux with a civil deputy (the praeses) as a counterweight to the power of the church authorities. All pretense of local autonomy had by then vanished. The presence of the soldiery was more noticeable, its power and influence more pervasive in the routine of town and village life. Taxes were perhaps not heavier than they had been earlier, but they were collected ruthlessly, and strong measures were sanctioned against those who tried to escape from their fiscal or legal obligations. The wealthier landowners probably enjoyed increased prosperity, especially as a result of the opportunity to buy state-owned land that had been sold into private ownership in the early 4th century. The great landlords were powerful enough to offer their peasant tenants a significant degree of collective fiscal protection against the agents of the state, the rapacious tax collector, the officious bureaucrat, or the brutal soldier. But, if the life of the average peasant did not change much, nevertheless the rich probably became richer, and the poor became poorer and more numerous as the moderate landholders were increasingly squeezed out of the picture.
The advance of Christianity
The advance of Christianity had just as profound an effect on the social and cultural fabric of Byzantine Egypt as on the political power structure. It brought to the surface the identity of the native Egyptians in the Coptic Church, which found a medium of expression in the development of the Coptic language—basically Egyptian written in Greek letters with the addition of a few characters. Coptic Christianity developed its own distinctive art too, much of it pervaded by the long-familiar motifs of Greek mythology. These motifs coexisted with representations of the Virgin and Child and with Christian parables and were expressed in decorative styles that owed a great deal to both Greek and Egyptian precedents. Although Christianity had made great inroads into the populace by AD 391, the year in which the practice of pagan religion was officially made illegal, it is hardly possible to quantify it or to trace a neat and uniform progression. It engulfed its pagan precedents slowly and untidily. In the first half of the 5th century a pagan literary revival occurred, centred on the town of Panopolis, and there is evidence that fanatical monks in the area attacked pagan temples and stole statues and magical texts. Outside the rarefied circles in which doctrinal disputes were discussed in philosophical terms, there was a great heterogeneous mass of commitment and belief. Both the Gnostics, who believed in redemption through knowledge, and the Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Mani, for example, clearly thought of themselves as Christians. In the 4th century a Christian community, the library of which was discovered at Naj' Hammadi in 1945, was reading both canonical and apocryphal gospels as well as mystical revelatory tracts. At the lower levels of society pagan magical practices remained ubiquitous and were simply converted into a Christian context.
By the middle of the 5th century Egypt's landscape was dominated by the great churches, such as the magnificent Church of St. Menas (Abu Mina), south of Alexandria, and by the monasteries. The latter were Egypt's distinctive contribution to the development of Christianity and were particularly important as strongholds of native loyalty to the Monophysite Church. The origins of Antonian communities, named for the founding father of monasticism, St. Anthony of Egypt (c. 251–356), lay in the desire of individuals to congregate about the person of a celebrated ascetic in a desert location, building their own cells, adding a church and a refectory, and raising towers and walls to enclose the unit. Other monasteries, called Pachomian after Pachomius, the founder of cenobitic monasticism, were planned from the start as walled complexes with communal facilities. The provision of water cisterns, kitchens, bakeries, oil presses, workshops, stables, and cemeteries and the ownership and cultivation of land in the vicinity made these communities self-sufficient to a high degree, offering their residents peace and protection against the oppression of the tax collector and the brutality of the soldier. But it does not follow that they were divorced from contact with nearby towns and villages. Indeed, many monastics were important local figures and many monastery churches were probably open to the local public for worship.
The economic and social power of the Christian Church in the Nile Valley and Delta is the outstanding development of the 5th and 6th centuries. By the time of the Arab invasion, in the mid-7th century, the uncomplicated propaganda of Islam might have seemed attractive and drawn attention to the political and religious rifts that successive and rival patriarchs of the Christian Church had so violently created and exploited. But the advent of Arab rule did not suppress Christianity in Egypt. Some areas remained heavily Christian for several centuries more.
Alan K. Bowman
From the Islamic conquest to 1250
Medieval Egyptian history opens and closes with foreign conquests of Egypt: the Arab invasion led by 'Amr ibn al-'As in 639 and the Napoleonic expedition of 1798 mark the beginning and end of an era. Within the context of Egyptian internal history alone, this era was one in which Egypt cast off the heritage of the past to embrace a new language and a new religion—in other words, a new culture. While it is true that the past was by no means immediately and completely abandoned and that many aspects of Egyptian life, especially rural life, continued virtually unchanged, it is nevertheless clear that the civilization of Islamic Egypt diverged sharply from that of the Greco-Roman period and was transformed under the impact of Western occupation. The history of medieval Egypt is therefore largely a study of the processes by which Egyptian Islamic civilization evolved, particularly the processes of Arabization and Islamization. But to confine Egyptian history to internal developments is to distort it, for during the entire medieval period Egypt was a part of a great world empire; and within this broader context, Egypt's history is a record of its long struggle to dominate an empire—a struggle that is not without its parallels, of course, in both ancient and modern times.
Period of Arab and Turkish governors (639–868)
The sending of a military expedition to Egypt from the caliphal capital in Medina came in a second phase of the first Arab conquests. Theretofore the conquests had been directed against lands on the northern borders of Arabia and were in the nature of raids for plunder; they had grown in scale and momentum as the Byzantines and Persians put up organized resistance. By 635 the Arabs had realized that in order to meet this resistance effectively they must begin the systematic occupation of enemy territory, especially Syria, where the Byzantine army was determined to halt the Arab forays.
The Arab conquest
The Arabs defeated the Byzantines and occupied the key cities of Syria and Palestine, and they vanquished the Persian army on the eastern front in Mesopotamia and Iraq. The next obvious step was to secure Syria against a possible attack launched from the Byzantine province of Egypt. Beyond this strategic consideration, Arab historians call attention to the fact that 'Amr ibn al-'As, the Arab general who later conquered Egypt, had visited Alexandria as a youth and had himself witnessed Egypt's enormous wealth. In spite of the obvious economic gain to be had from conquering Egypt, the caliph 'Umar, according to some sources, showed reluctance to detach 'Amr's expedition from the Syrian army and even tried to recall the mission once it had embarked; but 'Amr, with or without the Caliph's permission, undertook the invasion in 639 with a small army of some 4,000 men (later reinforced). With what seems astonishing speed the Byzantine forces were routed and had withdrawn from Egypt by 642. An attempt by a Byzantine fleet and army to reconquer Alexandria in 645 was quickly defeated by the Arabs.
Various explanations have been given for the speed with which the conquest was achieved, most of which stress the weakness of Byzantine resistance rather than Arab strength. Certainly the division of the Byzantine government and army into autonomous provincial units militated against the possibility of a concerted and coordinated response. Although there is only dubious evidence for the claim that the Copts welcomed the Arab invasion in the belief that Muslim religious tolerance would be preferable to Byzantine enforced orthodoxy and repression, Coptic support for their Byzantine oppressors was probably unenthusiastic at best.
Early Arab rule
In Egypt—as in Syria, Iraq, and Iran—the Arab conquerors did little in the beginning to disturb the status quo; as a small religious and ethnic minority, they thus hoped to make the occupation permanent. Treaties concluded between 'Amr and the muqawqis (presumably a title referring to Cyrus, archbishop of Alexandria) granted protection to the native population in exchange for the payment of tribute. There was no attempt to force, or even to persuade, the Egyptians to convert to Islam; the Arabs even pledged to preserve the Christian churches. The Byzantine system of taxation, combining a tax on land with a poll tax, was maintained, though it was streamlined and centralized for the sake of efficiency. The tax was administered by Copts, who staffed the tax bureau at all but the highest levels.
To the mass of inhabitants, the conquest must have made little practical difference, because the Muslim rulers left them alone, in the beginning at least, as long as they paid their taxes; if anything, their lot may have been slightly easier, because Byzantine religious persecution had ended. Moreover, the Arabs deliberately isolated themselves from the native population, according to 'Umar's decree that no Arab could own land outside the Arabian Peninsula; this policy aimed at preventing the Arab tribal armies from dispersing and at ensuring a steady revenue from agriculture, on the assumption that the former landowners would make better farmers than would the Arab nomads.
As was their policy elsewhere, the conquerors refrained from using an established city such as Alexandria as their capital; instead, they founded a new garrison town laid out in tribal quarters. As the site for this town they chose the strategic apex of the triangle formed by the Nile Delta—at that time occupied by the Byzantine fortified township of Babylon. They named the town Fustat, which is probably an Arabized form of the Greek term for “encampment” and gives a good indication of the nature of the earliest settlement. Like garrison towns founded by the Arabs in Iraq—Basra and Kufah—Fustat became the main agency of Arabization in Egypt inasmuch as it was the only town with an Arab majority and therefore required an extensive knowledge of Arabic from the native inhabitants.
The process of Arabization, however, was slow and gradual. Arabic did not displace Greek as the official language of state until 706, and there is evidence that Coptic continued to be used as a spoken language in Fustat. Given the lack of pressure from the conquerors, the spread of their religion must have been even slower than that of their language. A mosque was built in Fustat bearing the name of 'Amr ibn al-'As, and each quarter of the town had its own smaller mosque. 'Amr's mosque served not only as the religious centre of the town but also as the seat of certain administrative and judicial activities as well.
Although Alexandria was maintained as a port city, Fustat, being built on the Nile bank, was itself an important port and remained so until the 14th century. 'Amr enhanced the port's commercial significance by clearing and reopening Trajan's Canal, so that shipments of grain destined for Arabia could be sent from Fustat to the Red Sea by ship rather than by caravan.
Egypt under the caliphate
For more than 200 years—that is, throughout the Umayyad caliphate and well into the 'Abbasid—Egypt was ruled by governors appointed by the caliphs. As a province in an empire, Egypt's status was much the same as it had been for centuries under foreign rulers whose main interest was to supply the central government with Egyptian taxes and grain. In spite of evidence that the Arab governors tried in general to collect the taxes equitably, taking into account the capacities of individual landowners to pay and the annual variations in agricultural yield, resistance to paying the taxes increased in the 8th century and sometimes erupted into rebellion in times of economic distress. Periodically, religious unrest was manifested in the form of political insurrections, especially in those exceptional times when a governor openly discriminated against the Copts by forcing them to wear distinctive clothing or, worse, by destroying their icons. Still, the official policy, especially in Umayyad times, was tolerance, partly for fiscal reasons. In order to maintain the higher tax revenues collected from non-Muslims, the Arab governors discouraged conversion to Islam and even required those who did convert to continue paying the non-Muslim tax. New Christian churches were sometimes built, and the government took an interest in the selection of patriarchs.
More than just a source of grain and taxes, Egypt also became a base for Arab-Muslim expansion, by both land and sea. The former Byzantine shipyards in Alexandria provided the nucleus of the Egyptian navy, which between 649 and 669 joined in expeditions with the Syrian navy against Rhodes, Cyprus, and Sicily and defeated the Byzantine navy in a major battle at Phoenix in 655. By land, the Arab armies advanced both to the south and to the west. As early as 651–652 the governor of Egypt invaded Nubia and imposed a treaty that required the Nubians to pay an annual tribute and to permit the unmolested practice of Islam in the province. Raids against North Africa by Arab armies based in Egypt began in 647; by 670 the Arabs had succeeded in establishing a garrison city in Ifriqiyah (now Tunisia), called al-Qayrawan (Kairouan), which thenceforth displaced Egypt as the base for further expansion.
While some Arabs were passing through Egypt on their way to campaign in North Africa, others were being sent to the Nile Valley on a permanent basis. In addition to tribal contingents that at times escorted newly appointed governors to Egypt (some of which settled in towns), tribesmen were sometimes imported and settled in an effort to increase the Arab-Muslim concentration in the vicinity of Fustat. The settlement of large numbers of anarchic tribesmen in Egypt, with tribal ties and allegiances elsewhere in the empire, meant that Egypt became embroiled in political difficulties with the central government. Civil strife centring around the assassination of the caliph 'Uthman (656) began in Egypt, where the tribesmen resented the favouritism shown by the caliph to members of his own family. Uprisings led by the dissident Kharijite sect (the Seceders) were frequent in the mid-8th century. In the 9th century the caliph Ma'mun himself led an army from Iraq to put down a rebellion raised both by tribesmen and by Copts; repression of the Copts accompanying their defeat in 829–830 is usually cited as an important factor in accelerating conversion to Islam.
The difficulty inherent in ruling Egypt from Baghdad, which was itself undergoing stress and turbulence, is evident from the rapid turnover in governors assigned to Egypt; the 'Abbasid caliph Harun ar-Rashid (ruled 786–809), for example, appointed 24 governors in a reign of 23 years. Possibly as a means of both removing the governorship from the level of tribal strife and paying the central government's Turkish troops, the caliphs began assigning Egypt to Turks rather than to Arabs. But this policy resulted in no tangible improvement in the administration of Egyptian affairs until 868, when the reign of Ahmad ibn Tulun inaugurated a new phase of medieval Egyptian history.
The Tulunid dynasty (868–905)
Though short-lived, the Tulunid dynasty succeeded in restoring a measure of Egypt's ancient glory. For the first time since the pharaohs, Egypt became virtually autonomous and the bulk of its revenues remained within its borders. What is more, Egypt became the centre of a small empire when Ibn Tulun conquered Syria in 878–879. These developments were paralleled in other provinces of the 'Abbasid Empire and were the direct result of the decline of the caliph's power. In order to strengthen their armies, the 'Abbasid caliphs had begun early in the 9th century to form contingents of Turkish slaves. To finance these new military formations and, in particular, to pay the Turkish commanders who headed them, the caliphs began to give them administrative grants (iqta' in Arabic, usually translated “fief”) consisting of tax revenues from certain territories. In 868 Egypt was granted as a fief to the Turkish general Babak, who chose to remain in Iraq but appointed his stepson, Ahmad ibn Tulun, as his agent in Egypt. Ibn Tulun's great achievement was that he quickly established his own authority in Egypt and backed it up with an army of his own creation, powerful enough to defy the central government of Baghdad and to embark upon foreign expansion.
Ibn Tulun's first step was to eliminate possible rivals in Egypt. From an early date the administration of Egypt had been divided between the amir (military governor), appointed by the caliph, and the 'amil (fiscal officer), who was sometimes appointed by the caliph, sometimes by the governor. When Ibn Tulun entered Egypt in 868 he found the office of 'amil filled by one Ibn al-Mudabbir, who over a period of years had gained control of Egyptian finances, enriching himself in the process, and was therefore reluctant to acknowledge Ibn Tulun's authority. A struggle for power soon broke out between the two, which ended four years later with the transfer of Ibn al-Mudabbir to Syria and the assumption of his duties and powers by Ibn Tulun. An even more important step was the acquisition of an army that would be independent of the caliphate and loyal to Ibn Tulun. To build such an army, Ibn Tulun resorted to the same method the caliphs themselves used—the purchase of slaves who could be trained as military units loyal to their owner.
In 877, when Ibn Tulun failed to pay Egypt's full contribution to the 'Abbasid campaign against a black slave uprising in Iraq, the caliphal government, dominated by the caliph's brother al-Muwaffaq, realized that Egypt was slipping from imperial control. An expedition dispatched by al-Muwaffaq to remove Ibn Tulun from the governorship failed. Taking advantage of the caliphate's preoccupation with the revolt, Ibn Tulun in 878 invaded Syria, where he occupied the principal cities and garrisoned them with his troops. Thereafter he signified his autonomy by imprinting his name on the coinage along with the name of the caliph. Although the regent al-Muwaffaq lacked the resources to engage Ibn Tulun in battle, he did have him publicly cursed in the mosques of the empire as a means of retaliation.
Internally, Ibn Tulun took active measures to raise Egyptian agricultural productivity and thereby to increase tax revenues; the huge surplus he left in the state treasury at his death in 884 is a measure of his success. Another tangible indication of his achievement for Egypt is an enormous mosque (still standing) that he erected in a suburb of Fustat; in contrast, no building comparable in grandeur had even been contemplated by the governors who preceded him.
The great benefits Ibn Tulun had gained for Egypt by using its resources within the country were squandered by his son and successor, Khumarawayh. He expended huge sums on luxurious appointments for his residence and paid a fortune as a dowry for a daughter he married to the caliph al-Mu'tadid in 895. Nevertheless, Khumarawayh was able to maintain the Egyptian armies in the field, and he led them to victory both in Syria and in Mesopotamia. He resolved his father's conflict with the caliphate by a combination of arms and diplomacy, so that Khumarawayh's authority over Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia was given official caliphal recognition. This apparent strength evaporated when Khumarawayh was murdered in 896, leaving no funds with which his heir, a 14-year-old youth, could pay the troops. Both Egypt and Syria fell into anarchy, which lasted until 905 when a caliphal army invaded Egypt and momentarily restored it to the status of a province ruled by governors sent from Baghdad.
The Ikhshidid dynasty (935–969)
For 30 years the governors were unable to restore stability in Egypt. During this time, Egypt was subjected to attacks from the Fatimid state based in North Africa and to the rampages of an unruly domestic army. The appointment of Muhammad ibn Tughj, from Sogdiana in Central Asia, as governor in 935 led to a repetition of Ibn Tulun's achievement; by bold measures Muhammad established his authority over the treasury and the army, reasserted Egyptian influence in Syria, and won the governorship of the Holy Cities of Arabia (Mecca and Medina). In addition, he founded a dynasty; his sons inherited his Sogdian princely title of ikhshid, but their authority was usurped by their Abyssinian slave tutor, Kafur, who ruled Egypt with the caliph's sanction. When Kafur died in 968 the Ikhshidids were unable to maintain order in the army and the bureaucracy. In the following year the Fatimids took advantage of the disorder in Egypt to launch yet another attack, this one so successful that it led to the occupation of the country by a Berber army led by the Fatimid general Jawhar.
The Fatimid dynasty (969–1171)
The establishment of the Fatimid caliphate in 973 in the newly built palace city of Cairo had dramatic consequences for the evolution of Islamic Egypt. Politically, the Fatimids went a step further than the Tulunids by setting up Egypt as an independent rival to the 'Abbasid caliphate. In fact, an avowed aim of the early Fatimid propagandists was to achieve world dominion, eradicating the 'Abbasid caliphate in the process. For a variety of reasons they achieved neither of these goals; nevertheless, at the height of Fatimid power at the beginning of the 11th century, the Fatimid caliph could claim sovereignty over the whole North African coastal region, Sicily, the Hejaz and Yemen in Arabia, and southern Syria. Although actual political-military control was never firm except in Egypt, allegiance paid to the Fatimids by their provinces was just as meaningful as that paid to the 'Abbasids and for a time was certainly more widespread. Even when the Fatimid state fell into decline later in the 11th century and abandoned its imperial vision, Egypt continued to play an independent role in the Islamic world under the leadership of Armenian generals who had gained control of the Fatimid armies.
Islamization
It is difficult to estimate the religious change effected by the new dynasty except on the level of the governmental elite, which espoused the official doctrine of Isma'ili Shi'ism—the branch that held all authority to inhere in the line of Isma'il, who had predeceased both his father, the sixth 'Alid imam Ja'far ibn Muhammad at-Tamm. Because they believed that the Fatimid caliph was the only legitimate leader, the practice of Sunni (orthodox) Islam was theoretically outlawed in Fatimid domains. But the practical difficulties which the Isma'ili minority faced in imposing its will on the Sunni majority meant that the Muslim population of Egypt remained predominantly Sunni throughout the Fatimid period. Certainly there was no public outcry when Saladin, who founded the Ayyubid dynasty, restored Egypt to Sunni rule in 1171. Regarding non-Muslims, the Fatimids, with one notable exception, were known for their tolerance, and the Copts continued to serve in the bureaucracy. Several Copts held the highest administrative post—the vizierate—without changing their religion. Jews also figured prominently in the government; in fact, a Jewish convert to Islam, Ibn Killis, was the first Fatimid vizier and is credited with laying the foundations of the Fatimid administrative system. Christians and Jews even managed to survive the reign of the mad caliph al-Hakim (ruled 996–1021), who ordered the destruction of Christian churches in Fatimid territory, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and offered his non-Muslim subjects the choice of conversion to Islam or expulsion from Fatimid territory. This period of persecution undoubtedly accelerated the rate of conversion to Islam, if only on a temporary and superficial level.
In comparison with Iraq, Egypt contributed relatively little to Arabic literature and Islamic learning during the early 'Abbasid period. But the Fatimids' intense interest in propagating Isma'ili Shi'ism through a network of missionary propagandists made Egypt an important religious and intellectual centre. The foundation of the mosque-college of al-Azhar as well as of other academies drew Shi'ite scholars to Egypt from all over the Muslim world and stimulated the production of original contributions in literature, philosophy, and the Islamic sciences.
Arabization
The Arabization of Egypt continued at a gradual pace. The early Fatimids' reliance on Berber troops was soon balanced by the importation of Turkish, Sudanese, and Arab contingents. The Fatimids are said to have used thousands of nomadic Arabs in the Egyptian cavalry and to have further stimulated Arabization by settling large numbers of Arabian tribesmen in Upper Egypt to deprive the Qarmatians—their Isma'ili enemies in Iraq and Arabia—of Arab tribal support. On the other hand, the Fatimids reduced the Arab population of Egypt in the mid-11th century, when they incited the Banu Hilal and the Banu Sulaym tribes to emigrate from Egypt into the neighbouring Berber kingdom of Ifriqiyah.
Growth of trade
One of the most far-reaching changes in Fatimid times was the growth of Egyptian commerce, especially in Fustat, which had become the port city for Cairo, the Fatimid capital. Theretofore, Iraq in the east and Tunisia in the west had been flourishing centres for trade conducted both within the Muslim world and between the Muslim and the Christian empires of the West. A number of factors contributed to alter this situation in favour of Egypt. As centralized power declined in Iraq, Mesopotamia, and Syria during the 9th and 10th centuries, traffic on the trade routes across these areas also declined. In Egypt, however, the establishment of a strong government, which soon controlled the Red Sea and maintained a strong navy in the eastern Mediterranean, offered an attractive alternative for the international transit trade between the Orient and Christendom. In addition to having the political stability essential for trade, the Fatimids encouraged commerce by their low tariff policy and their noninterference in the affairs of merchants who did business in Egypt. These factors, along with increased European mercantile activity in the Italian cities, helped restore Egypt as a great international entrepôt.
The end of the Fatimid dynasty
The Fatimid achievement in restoring to Egypt a measure of its ancient glory was remarkable but brief. Halfway through their history the political-religious authority of the Fatimid caliphs was vitiated by military uprisings that could be put down only by force. By 1163 the Fatimid caliph had been shunted aside in a power struggle between the vizier and the chamberlain, who were themselves so impotent that they had to seek help from the Sunni and even from the crusader powers of Syria and Palestine. Thus began a series of invasions at the behest of Fatimid officials, which ended in 1169 with the occupation of Egypt by an army from Syria, one of whose commanders—Saladin—was appointed Fatimid vizier. Two years later Saladin restored Egypt to 'Abbasid allegiance, abolished the Fatimid caliphate, and, in effect, established the Ayyubid dynasty.
The Ayyubid dynasty (1171–1250)
Under Saladin and his descendants, Egypt was reintegrated into the Sunni world of the Eastern caliphate. Indeed, Egypt became champion of that world against the crusaders and, as such, chief target of the crusader armies. But this was a gradual process that required Saladin first to build an army strong enough to establish his power in Egypt and then to unite the factions of Syria and Mesopotamia under his leadership against the Franks. By so doing he reconstituted the Egyptian empire, which included, in addition to the areas just named, Yemen, the Hejaz, and, with the fall of Jerusalem (1187), a major part of the Holy Land.
The abolition of the Fatimid caliphate and the official reinstitution of Sunni Islam seems to have caused little perturbation in Egypt except for an uprising by the Fatimid palace guard, quickly suppressed. This undoubtedly means that Isma'ili Shi'ism was confined to Fatimid ruling circles.
Saladin's policies
Saladin's remission of all taxes not explicitly sanctioned by Islamic law must have contributed to his own popularity as well as to the stability of his regime. To ensure the defense of his state against both internal and external enemies, he strengthened the fortifications of Cairo by building a citadel and extending the Fatimid city walls. Despite the major military and propagandistic efforts mounted against the crusaders, Saladin continued to treat the Christians of Egypt with tolerance; the Coptic Church thrived under the Ayyubids, and Copts still served the government. Saladin also treated the Christians of Jerusalem with magnanimity after the conquest of that city.
Much to the consternation of the popes, trade between Egypt and the Italian city-states remained brisk, and the Egyptians were able to use raw materials provided by the Italian merchants to forge weapons against the crusaders. The administration of Egypt stayed in the hands of the vast, mainly civilian, bureaucracy, but was supervised by military officials.
Power struggles
The Ayyubids introduced a significant change in the governance of their empire that was decisive for the history of their rule in Egypt. Though the Ayyubids were themselves of Kurdish descent, Saladin followed the Turkish practice of assigning the provinces as fiefdoms to members of his family. In theory, such a measure would ensure the loyalty of the provinces to the central government of Egypt through the loyalty of Ayyubid kinsmen to their family leader. In practice, however, the measure led to recurrent power struggles in which each governor used his province as a base from which to defy the supreme Ayyubid power of Egypt. The sultans al-Malik al-'Adil (died 1218) and al-Malik al-Kamil (died 1238) each succeeded in reuniting Syria and Egypt under his own leadership. Kamil, especially, was able to exploit Frankish attacks—in the form of the Fifth Crusade, directed against Damietta—to rally family and provincial support for the defense of Egypt. Nevertheless, given the dissension within the Ayyubid empire, it was clearly in the interest of the Egyptian sultan to reach a peaceful settlement with the crusaders; this was achieved in 1229 by a truce between Kamil and the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II. The agreement stipulated that Kamil exchange possession of Jerusalem and other territory in the Holy Land for Frederick's guarantee to support the sultan against aggression from any source.
Growth of Mamluk armies
The only real security for Ayyubid Egypt lay in its independent military strength. This explains why one of the last sultans, al-Malik as-Salih Ayyub (died 1249), resorted to increased purchase of Turkish slaves—called Mamluks, a name derived from the Arabic word for slave—as a means of manning his armies. Although slave troops had formed an important part of Egyptian armies since the time of Ahmad ibn Tulun, their strength had been checked by racial dissension among the various slave units and by the presence of nonslave elements. But after the death of as-Salih Ayyub in the course of the Sixth Crusade, which the Egyptians defeated thanks to the Mamluk corps, the Mamluks were able to exploit a palace feud and to elevate a member of their own ranks to the sultanate, which lasted for two and a half centuries and brought Egypt to the peak of its evolution in the medieval period.
The Mamluk and Ottoman periods (1250–1800)
The Mamluk dynasty (1250–1517)
During the Mamluk period Egypt became the unrivaled political, economic, and cultural centre of the eastern Arabic-speaking zone of the Muslim world. Symbolic of this development was the reestablishment in 1261 under the Mamluks of the 'Abbasid caliphate in Cairo (the Mongols had abolished the caliphate when they invaded Baghdad in 1258). Although the caliph enjoyed little authority and had no power, the mere fact that the Mamluks chose to maintain the institution in Cairo is a measure of their determination to dominate Arabic Islam. It is curious that the Mamluks—all of whom were of non-Arab, non-Muslim origin and some of whom knew little if any Arabic—established a regime that saved a substantial portion of Muslim territory from pagan domination and established Egypt's supremacy in Arabic culture.
Political life
The political history of the Mamluk state is complex; during their 264-year reign, no fewer than 45 Mamluks gained the sultanate, and once, in desperate circumstances, a caliph (in 1412) was briefly installed as sultan. At times individual Mamluks succeeded in establishing dynasties, most notably Sultan Qala'un (ruled 1279–90), whose progeny ruled Egypt, with two short interruptions, until 1382. Often the Mamluks chose to allow a sultan's son to succeed his father only for as long as it took another Mamluk to build up enough support to seize the throne for himself. In reality there was no principle of legitimacy other than force, for without sufficient military power a sultan could expect to be overthrown by a stronger Mamluk.
Donald P. Little
Nevertheless, several sultans succeeded in harnessing the energies of the Mamluk system to establish internal stability and to embark on foreign conquests. Soon after the Mamluk victory over the Mongols at 'Ayn Jalut in 1260, Baybars I seized power. He was the true founder of the Mamluk state, and he campaigned actively and with success against the remaining crusader possessions in Palestine and Syria. He ruled until 1277. During the long reign of al-Malik an-Nasir (ruled 1293–1341), the Mamluks concluded a truce with the Mongols (1323) after several major battles and, despite widespread famine, outbreaks of religious strife, and Bedouin uprisings, maintained economic prosperity in Egypt and peaceful relations with foreign powers, both Muslim and Christian.
Donald P. Little
D.S. Richards
Although the state began to decline politically and economically after the death of Nasir in 1341, Egypt continued to dominate Eastern Arabdom. But the cumulative effect of the plague, which swept Egypt in 1348 and on many occasions subsequently; Timur's victory in Syria in 1400; and Egypt's loss to the Portuguese of control over the Indian trade, along with the sultans' inability to keep their refractory Mamluk corps under control, gradually sapped the strength of the state. The best efforts of such a vigorous sultan as Qa'it Bay (ruled 1468–96) failed to make Egypt strong enough to defend its Syrian empire against raids by the Turkoman states of Anatolia and Azerbaijan and campaigns of the Ottoman Turks.
Contributions to Arabic culture
By the time of the Mamluks, the Arabization of Egypt must have been almost complete. Arabic had been the language of the bureaucracy since the early 8th century and the language of religion and culture even longer. Moreover, the prevalence of Arabic as a written and spoken language is attested by the discovery in the geniza (storeroom) of a Cairo synagogue of thousands of letters and documents—called the “Geniza Documents”—dating from the 11th through the 13th century. Though often written in Hebrew characters, the actual language of most of these documents is Arabic, which proves that Arabic was widely used even by non-Muslims. The main incentive for learning Arabic must have come from the desire of a subject population to learn the language of the ruling elite. The immigration of Arab tribesmen during the early centuries of the occupation, and their intermarriage with the indigenous inhabitants, must also have contributed to the gradual spread of Arabic in Egypt.
The specific Mamluk contribution to Arabic culture, however, lay above all in the military achievement. By defeating the Mongols, the Mamluks provided a haven in Syria and in Egypt for Muslims fleeing from Mongol devastation. The extent of this haven was narrowed by subsequent Mongol attacks against Syria, one of which led to a brief Mongol occupation of Damascus in 1294–95, so that Egypt received an influx of refugees from Syria itself as well as from areas farther east.
This accidental displacement of scholars and artisans into Egypt does not, however, wholly account for the efflorescence of certain types of cultural activity under the Mamluks. In the same way as they supported the caliphate as a visible symbol of their legitimate claim to rule Islamic territory, the Mamluks cultivated and patronized religious leaders whose skills they needed in administering their empire and in directing the religious sentiments of the masses into safe (i.e., nondisruptive) channels. Those divines who cooperated with the state were rewarded with government offices, in the case of the 'ulama' (religious scholars), and with endowed monasteries, in the case of the Sufis (mystics). On the other hand, those who dared criticize the prevailing social and moral order were thrown into prison (such was the fate of the famous legist, Ibn Taymiyah, who, having emigrated from Mesopotamia in order to escape the Mongols, was incarcerated in Cairo by the Mamluks and their religious functionaries for spreading seditious doctrines).
Concrete evidence of the stimulus the Mamluks gave to cultural life can be found chiefly in the fields of architecture and historiography. Dozens of public buildings erected under Mamluk patronage are still standing in Cairo and include mosques, colleges, hospitals, monasteries, and caravansaries. Historical writing under the Mamluks was equally monumental, in the form of immense chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and encyclopaedias.
Religious life
The Mamluk period is also important in Egyptian religious history. With few and therefore notable exceptions, the Muslim rulers of Egypt had seldom interfered with the lives of their Christian and Jewish subjects so long as these groups paid the special taxes levied on them in exchange for state protection. Indeed, both Copts and Jews had always served in the Muslim bureaucracy, sometimes in the very highest administrative positions. Even the Crusades apparently failed to upset the delicate balance between Muslims and Christians. Trade with the Italian city-states had certainly continued, and there is no evidence that the local Christians were held accountable for the crusader invasions of Egypt. While it is true that Saladin dismissed all Copts from the bureaucracy and imposed sumptuary laws on them, this policy was abandoned by his successors in their desire to reach an accommodation with the crusaders.
With the establishment of the Mamluk dynasty, however, it is generally agreed that the lot of the Christians, both in Egypt and in Syria, took a distinct turn for the worse. One indication of this change is the increased production of anti-Christian polemics written by Muslim theologians. A possible reason for the change may have been the association of Christians with the Mongol peril. Because the Mongols used Christian auxiliaries in their armies—Georgians and Armenians in particular—they often spared the Christian populations of towns they conquered, while slaughtering the Muslims. Also, the diplomatic efforts aimed at uniting the Mongols with Christian European powers in a joint crusade against the Muslims might have contributed to the Mamluks' distrust of the Christians. But the dissatisfaction seems to have originated not so much with the Mamluk rulers as with the masses, and it seems to have been directed not so much against Christians' sympathy for the Mongols as against their privileged position and role in the Mamluk state.
On several occasions popular resentment against the Copts' conspicuous wealth and their employment in the government was manifested in public demonstrations. Both Muslims and Christians resorted to arson, burning the others' sanctuaries, to express their hatred. Under such pressure, the Mamluk government dismissed Christians from the bureaucracy on no fewer than nine occasions between 1279 and 1447, and in 1301 it ordered all the churches in Egypt closed. As a result of these intermittent persecutions and the destruction of churches, it is believed that the rate of conversion to Islam accelerated markedly in the Mamluk period and that Coptic virtually disappeared except as a liturgical language. By the end of the Mamluk dynasty, the Muslims may well have reached the same numerical superiority that they enjoy in modern times—a ratio of more than 10 to one.
Economic life
In trade and commerce, the Mamluk period marks the zenith of medieval Egyptian economic history. During the 13th and 14th centuries (as long, that is, as the sultanate was able to maintain order in Egypt), trade was heavy with Mediterranean and Black Sea ports and with India. The Oriental trade was controlled largely by a group of Muslim merchants known as the Karimis; the Mediterranean trade was left to European traders, whom the Mamluks allowed certain privileges in Alexandria. By the 15th century, however, Egypt's commercial importance rapidly deteriorated as the result of population losses, increased government interference in commerce, Bedouin raiding, and Portuguese competition in the Indian trade.
The Ottomans (1517–1798)
With the Ottomans' defeat of the Mamluks in 1516–17, Egyptian medieval history had come full circle, as Egypt reverted to the status of a province governed from Istanbul. Again the country was exploited as a source of taxation for the benefit of an imperial government and as a base for foreign expansion. The economic decline that had begun under the late Mamluks continued, and with it came a decline in Egyptian culture.
Some historians attribute the lethargy of Ottoman Egypt solely to Ottoman domination. But although Ottoman policy was geared to imperial, not Egyptian, needs, it was obviously to the rulers' benefit to provide a stable government that would maintain Egyptian agriculture at a high level of productivity and would promote the transit trade. To a certain extent Ottoman actions served these purposes. The decisive factor that ultimately undermined Ottoman policies was the perpetuation of the former Mamluk elite; though they collaborated with the Ottoman government, they often defied it and in the end they dominated it. By and large the history of Ottoman Egypt concerns the process by which the conquered Mamluks reasserted their power within the Egyptian state.
The Ottoman conquest
From the conquest itself, the Ottoman presence in Egypt was entangled with Mamluk factionalism. There is no doubt that the Ottomans invaded Syria in 1516 to break an incipient coalition against Ottoman expansion between the Safavids of Persia and the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria. The long-standing enmity between the Ottomans and the Mamluks arose from their contest to control the Turkoman frontier states north of Syria. After the Ottomans strengthened their hold over eastern Anatolia in 1514, it was only natural that the Mamluks should attempt to bolster their forces in northern Syria and exchange diplomatic missions with the Safavids. The Ottoman sultan Selim the Grim responded by attacking the reinforced Mamluk army in Syria, probably as a preliminary step in a new campaign against the Safavids. In 1516, after Selim had defeated the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq (north of Aleppo), Ottoman goals had probably been met, especially since the Mamluk sultan Qansuh al-Ghauri died in the battle. But the Mamluks rallied around a new sultan in Cairo, who refused to accept Selim's terms for a settlement. Spurred on by the Mamluk traitor Khair Bey, Selim marched against Egypt in 1517, defeated the Mamluks, and installed Khair Bey as Ottoman governor. Khair Bey died in 1552; thereafter, the Ottoman viceroy (called vali), with the title of pasha, was sent from Istanbul.
Ottoman administration
In 1525 the Ottoman administration of Egypt was defined and codified by the Ottoman grand vizier, Ibrahim Pasa, who was dispatched to Egypt for this purpose by the sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. According to the terms of Ibrahim Pasa's decree (qanun-name), Egypt was to be ruled by a viceroy aided by an advisory council (divan) and an army comprising both Ottoman and local corps. The collection of taxes and the administration of the four provinces into which Egypt was divided were assigned to inspectors (kashifs). Although the Egyptian government was headed by bureaucratic officials sent from Istanbul, and supported by Ottoman troops, the Mamluks were able to penetrate both the bureaucracy and the army. The kashifs were often drawn from Mamluk ranks; three of the seven military corps formed by the Ottomans in the 16th century were recruited in Egypt, one of which—the Circassians—was composed of Circassian Mamluks. Their service in the army enabled the Mamluk amirs to secure high-ranking military posts that entitled them to serve on the divan itself.
By the 17th century a distinct elite bearing the title of bey had emerged, which consisted largely of Mamluk amirs. These beys held no specific offices but were nevertheless paid a salary by the Ottoman government. The elite was perpetuated through the old Mamluk system of purchasing slaves, giving them military training, then freeing them and attaching them to one of the great Mamluk houses of Egypt. Thus, for all practical purposes, the Mamluks maintained themselves as an elite throughout the Ottoman period. They were no longer the only political-military elite, as they had been in the past, but they ultimately succeeded in reestablishing their dominance. Yet the chief obstacle to the growth of their power was not so much the Ottoman ruling hierarchy as it was their own factionalism. During the 17th and 18th centuries the Mamluks were divided into two great rival houses—the Faqariyya and the Qasimiyya—whose mutual hostility often broke out into fighting and impaired the strength of Mamluks as a bloc.
Mamluk power under the Ottomans
In spite of internal dissension and the resistance of the non-Mamluk hierarchy, the Mamluks had emerged by the early 18th century as the supreme power in Egyptian politics. While the beys continued to acknowledge the authority of the Ottoman viceroy and to send tribute to Istanbul, the strongest single figure in Egypt was the bey who held the newly coined title of shaykh al-balad (“chief of the city”), which signified that he was recognized by the other beys as their chief. The Mamluks' rise to power was climaxed by the careers of two amirs—'Ali Bey and Abu Dhahab—both of whom secured from the Sublime Porte (Ottoman government) de facto recognition of their autonomy in Egypt (1768–76) and even undertook military campaigns in Syria and the Hejaz. The Ottomans attempted to end the Mamluk domination by sending an army to Egypt in 1786. Although it was initially successful, this attempt failed and the troops were withdrawn a year later. A Mamluk duumvirate was reestablished, and it lasted until Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798.
Expansion
During the 16th century, when their regime in Egypt was strongest, the Ottomans used Egypt as a base for expansion to the south. Like the Mamluk rulers before them, they attempted to control the southern approaches to Egypt by instituting their authority in Nubia; this they achieved by annexing Nubia as far south as the Third Cataract. Elsewhere, they undertook to reassert Egyptian command of the Red Sea, which the Portuguese had begun to contest during the early 16th century. Ottoman fleets and troops captured Yemen and Aden (1536–46) and thus dominated the lower Red Sea; in 1557 they strengthened this position by setting up a colony on the Abyssinian coast at Mitsiwa (Massawa). In the 17th century these outposts began to lose their importance as Ottoman and Portuguese power began to decline and the Dutch took over the spice trade.
Culture
Given the political instability and the economic decline that had prevailed in Egypt since late Mamluk times, it is not surprising that the culture of Ottoman Egypt lacked vitality. Perhaps the most telling example of intellectual quiescence was the dramatic decline in the quantity of historical works produced in Egypt. As already noted, the Mamluk period is renowned for the number and quality of its historians, partly because the amirs patronized court historians; by contrast, in almost three centuries of Ottoman rule Egypt produced only one historian worthy of note, al-Jabarti (died 1825), famous for his observations on the French occupation. The Ottomans also fell short of the Mamluks' achievement in architecture; there is no lack of public buildings erected under Ottoman patronage, but even the best of these are imitations of the Byzantine basilica, which had been adopted as the model for mosques.
Religious affairs
Like all previous Muslim governments, the Ottomans continued to employ Copts in the financial offices of the bureaucracy. The Ottomans allowed the caliphate, so assiduously preserved in its nominal form by the Mamluks, to lapse. At first the caliph was installed in Istanbul by Selim the Grim. Later the caliph—the last of the ‘Abbasid line—returned to Egypt, where he died in the reign of Süleyman. The claim that the caliph had transferred his authority to the Ottoman sultan is an 18th-century invention.
Donald P. Little
From the French to the British occupation (1798–1882)
The French occupation and its consequences (1798–1805)
Although several projects for a French occupation of Egypt had been advanced in the 17th and 18th centuries, the purpose of the expedition that sailed under Napoleon Bonaparte from Toulon in May 1798 was specifically connected with the war against Britain. Bonaparte had discounted the feasibility of an invasion of England but hoped, by occupying Egypt, to damage British trade, to threaten India, and to obtain assets for bargaining in any future peace settlement. Meanwhile, as a colony under the benevolent and progressive administration of Revolutionary France, Egypt would be regenerated and regain its ancient prosperity. The military and naval forces were therefore accompanied by a commission of scholars and scientists to investigate and report the past and present condition of the country.
Eluding the British Mediterranean fleet under Lord Nelson, the French landed at Abu Qir (Aboukir) Bay on July 1 and took Alexandria the next day. In an Arabic proclamation, Bonaparte assured the Egyptians that he came as a friend to Islam and the Ottoman sultan, to punish the usurping Mamluks and to liberate the people. From Alexandria the French advanced on Cairo, defeating Murad Bey at Shubrakhit (July 13), and again decisively at Imbabah, opposite Cairo in the so-called Battle of the Pyramids on July 21. Murad fled to Upper Egypt, while his colleague, Ibrahim Bey, together with the Ottoman viceroy, made his way to Syria.
After entering Cairo (July 25), Bonaparte sought to conciliate the population, especially the religious leaders ('ulama'), by demonstrating his sympathy with Islam and by establishing councils (divans) as a means of consulting Egyptian opinion. The destruction of the French fleet at Abu Qir by Nelson in the so-called Battle of the Nile on August 1 virtually cut Bonaparte's communications and made it necessary for him to consolidate his rule and to make the expeditionary force as self-sufficient as possible. The savants, organized in the Institut d'Égypte, played their part in this. Meanwhile, Egyptian resentment at alien rule, administrative innovations, and the growing fiscal burden of military occupation was exacerbated when the Ottoman sultan, Selim III (1789–1807), declared war on France on September 11. An unforeseen revolt in Cairo on October 21 was suppressed after an artillery bombardment that ended any hopes of cordial Franco-Egyptian coexistence.
Ottoman Syria, dominated by Ahmad al-Jazzar, the governor of Acre, was the base from which French-occupied Egypt might most easily be threatened, and Bonaparte resolved to deny it to his enemies. His invasion force crossed the frontier in February 1799 but failed to take Acre after a protracted siege (March 19–May 20), and Bonaparte evacuated Syrian territory. A seaborne Ottoman invading force landed at Abu Qir in July but failed to maintain its bridgehead. At this point Bonaparte resolved to return to France and succeeded in slipping away on August 22, past the British fleet.
His successor as general in chief, Jean-Baptiste Kléber, viewed the situation of the expeditionary force with pessimism and, like many of the soldiers, wished to return to the theatre of war in Europe. He therefore entered into negotiations with the Ottomans and by the Convention of al-'Arish (Jan. 24, 1800) agreed to evacuate Egypt. Sir Sydney Smith, the British naval commander in the eastern Mediterranean, sponsored the convention, but in this he had exceeded his powers and was instructed by his superior officer, Admiral Lord Keith, to require the French to surrender as prisoners of war. Although the Ottoman reoccupation was well underway, Kléber and the French determined on resistance and defeated the Turkish forces at the Battle of Heliopolis (March 20). A second revolt of Cairo, fomented by Ottoman fugitives, took about a month to suppress; but French authority had been restored when Kléber was assassinated by a Syrian Muslim, Sulayman al-Halabi, on June 14.
His successor, 'Abd Allah Jacques Menou, a French officer (and former nobleman) who had turned Muslim, was determined to maintain the occupation and administered at first a tolerably settled country, although he lacked the prestige of his two predecessors. In 1801 a threefold invasion of Egypt began. British troops were landed at Abu Qir in March, while the Ottomans advanced from Syria. Shortly afterward, British Indian forces were landed at Qusayr on the Red Sea coast. The French garrison in Cairo capitulated in June and Menou himself at Alexandria in September.
The Rosetta Stone, with Egyptian hieroglyphs in the top section, demotic characters in the middle, …
Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum
The brief episode of the French occupation was to be significant for Egypt in several ways. The arrival of a European army accompanied by scholars and scientists appropriately inaugurated the impact of the West, which was to be felt increasingly in the next 150 years. Egypt, protected for five centuries by the Mamluk and Ottoman sultanates, was no longer immune from European attack: it had become an object of the contending policies of France and Britain, a part of the “Eastern Question.” Bonaparte's savants had little success in interpreting Western culture to the traditionalist 'ulama' of Cairo; their achievement was rather to unveil Egypt to Europe. They uncovered the celebrated Rosetta Stone (see photograph), which held a trilingual inscription making it possible to decipher hieroglyphs and which thus laid the foundation of modern Egyptology. Their reports and monographs were collected in the monumental Description de l'Égypte (“Description of Egypt”), which was published in parts from 1809 to 1828 in Paris.
Of more immediate consequence for Egypt was the effect of the French occupation upon internal politics. The Mamluk ascendancy was fatally weakened. Murad Bey, who had made his peace with the French, died shortly before their capitulation in 1801; and Ibrahim Bey, who returned to Egypt with the Ottomans, had henceforward little power. The new Mamluk leaders, 'Uthman Bey al-Bardisi and Muhammad Bey al-Alfi, former retainers of Murad, headed rival factions and had in any case to reckon with the British and Ottoman occupation forces. In March 1803 the British were evacuated in accordance with the Peace of Amiens. But the Ottomans, determined to reassert their control over Egypt, remained, establishing their power through a viceroy and an occupying army, in which the most effective fighting force was an Albanian contingent. The Albanians, however, acted as an independent party and in May 1803 mutinied and installed their own leader as acting viceroy. When he was assassinated shortly afterward, the command of the Albanians passed to his lieutenant, Muhammad 'Ali (born 1769), who, during the ensuing two years, cautiously strengthened his own position at the expense of both the Mamluks and the Ottomans.
Muhammad 'Ali and his successors (1805–82)
Expansion of Egypt under Muhammad 'Ali and Isma'il.
In May 1805 a revolt broke out in Cairo against the Ottoman viceroy, Khurshid Pasha. The 'ulama' invested Muhammad 'Ali as viceroy. For some weeks there was street fighting, and Khurshid was besieged in the Citadel. In July Sultan Selim III confirmed Muhammad 'Ali in office and the revolt ended.
Muhammad 'Ali's viceroyalty was marked by a series of military successes, some of which were attended by political failures that frustrated his wider aims. After the renewal of war between Britain and Napoleonic France in 1803, Egypt again became an area of strategic significance. A British expedition occupied Alexandria in 1807 but failed to capture Rosetta and, after a defeat at the hands of Muhammad 'Ali's forces, was allowed to withdraw.
Military expansion
In Arabia, the domination of Mecca and Medina by puritanical Wahhabi Muslims was a serious embarrassment to the Ottoman sultan, who was the titular overlord of the Arabian territory of the Hejaz and the leading Muslim sovereign. At the invitation of Sultan Mahmud II (1808–39), Muhammad 'Ali sent an expedition to Arabia that between 1811 and 1813 expelled the Wahhabis from the Hejaz. In a further campaign (1816–18), Ibrahim Pasha, the viceroy's eldest son, defeated the Wahhabis in their homeland of Najd and brought central Arabia within Egyptian control. In 1820–21 Muhammad 'Ali sent an expedition up the Nile and conquered much of what is now the northern Sudan. By so doing, he made himself master of one of the principal channels of the slave trade and began an African empire that was to be expanded under his successors.
After the outbreak of the Greek insurrection against Ottoman rule, Muhammad 'Ali, at Sultan Mahmud II's request, suppressed the Cretan revolt in 1822. In 1825 Ibrahim began a victorious campaign in the Morea in southern Greece, where his military success provoked intervention by the European powers and brought on the destruction of the Ottoman and Egyptian fleets at the Battle of Navarino in October 1827. The Morea was evacuated the following year.
In 1831 Muhammad 'Ali embarked upon the invasion of Syria. His pretext was a quarrel with the governor of Acre, but deeper considerations were involved, particularly the growing strength of the Sultan, which might threaten his own autonomy. Syria, moreover, was strategically important; and its products, especially timber, usefully complemented the Egyptian economy. The Ottoman army was defeated near Konya in Anatolia (December 1832), and in 1833 the Sultan ceded the Syrian provinces to Muhammad 'Ali.
In 1839 Ottoman forces reentered Syria but were defeated by Ibrahim at the Battle of Nizip (Nezib). A fortnight later Mahmud II died, and the Ottoman Empire seemed on the verge of dissolution; it was saved only by European intervention. In 1840 Ibrahim was compelled to evacuate Syria. Muhammad 'Ali's Arabian empire (which since 1833 had extended into the Yemen) crumbled at the same time. Although in June 1842 the new sultan, Abdülmecid I (1839–61), conferred on the family of Muhammad 'Ali the hereditary rule of Egypt, the viceroy's powers were declining. Because of his growing senility, Ibrahim succeeded him (July 1848) but his reign lasted only a few months until his death the following November. The next viceroy was 'Abbas I, the eldest grandson of Muhammad 'Ali. The old viceroy himself died in 1849.
Administrative changes
Muhammad 'Ali's military exploits would not have been possible but for radical changes in the administration of Egypt itself. Muhammad 'Ali was a pragmatic statesman whose principal objective was to secure himself and his family in the unchallenged possession of Egypt. His immediate problem on his accession was to deal with the Mamluks, who still dominated much of the country, and the 'ulama', who had helped him to power. The strength of these two groups rested largely on their control of the agricultural land of Egypt and the revenues arising therefrom. Gradually, between 1805 and 1815, Muhammad 'Ali eroded the system of tax farming that had diverted most of the revenues to the Mamluks and other notables, imposed the direct levy of taxes, expropriated the landholders, and carried out a new tax survey. In 1809 he defeated the 'ulama', and in 1811 he massacred many of the Mamluk leaders in Cairo, while Ibrahim expelled their survivors from Upper Egypt.
Muhammad 'Ali thus became effectively the sole landholder, with a monopoly over trade in crops, in Egypt, although later in his reign he made considerable grants of land to his family and dependents. The monopoly system was extended in due course from primary materials to manufactures, with the establishment of state control over the textile industry. Muhammad 'Ali's ambitious hopes of promoting an industrial revolution in Egypt were not realized, fundamentally because of the lack of available sources of power. The monopolies were resented by European merchants in Egypt and clashed with the economic doctrine of free trade upheld by the British government. Although a free-trade convention that was concluded between Britain and the Ottoman Empire in 1838 (the Convention of Balta Liman) was technically binding on Egypt, Muhammad 'Ali succeeded in evading its application up to and even after the reversal of his fortunes in 1840-41.
The old-style military forces (including the Albanians), on whom Muhammad 'Ali relied against his internal opponents and who conquered the Hejaz, Najd, and the northern Sudan, were heterogenous and unruly. An attempt to introduce Western methods of training in 1815 provoked a mutiny. Muhammad 'Ali then decided to form an army of slave-troops dependent wholly upon himself and trained by European instructors. The conquest of the Sudan was intended to provide the recruits. But the slaves, encamped at Aswan, died wholesale, and Muhammad 'Ali had to look elsewhere for the mass of his troops. In 1823 he took the momentous step of conscripting Egyptian peasants for the rank and file of his “new model army.” On the other hand, the officers were mostly Turkish-speaking Ottomans, while the director of the whole enterprise, Sulayman Pasha (Colonel Sève), was a former French officer. The conscription was brutally administered and military life harsh. There were several ineffective peasant revolts, while flight to the towns and (before 1831) to Syria produced rural depopulation and a decline in cultivation.
As reorganization proceeded, the viceroy gradually built a new administrative structure. While institutions were created and discarded according to his changing needs, Muhammad 'Ali depended essentially upon the members of his own family, particularly Ibrahim, and loyal servants, such as his Armenian confidant Boghos Bey. Characteristic of his governmental system were councils of officials, convened to deliberate on public business, and administrative departments (divans) that bore some resemblance to the ministries of European governments. In local administration, Muhammad 'Ali established a highly centralized system with a clear chain of command from Cairo through the provincial governors, down to the village headmen. Initiative was not encouraged, but firm control had taken the place of anarchy.
These changes necessitated the training of officers and officials in the new Europeanized ways of working; and this in turn resulted in the creation of a range of educational institutions alongside the traditional Muslim schools that prepared the 'ulama'. Much of the foundation work was done by expatriates, while missions of Egyptian students were sent to Europe, especially to Paris. One of these, Rifa'ah Rafi' at-Tahtawi (1801–73), played the leading part in inaugurating the translation of European works into Arabic and so was a pioneer both in the interpretation of European culture to Egypt and in the renaissance of literary Arabic. The establishment of a government printing press in 1815 soon made possible the wide dissemination of the new books.
'Abbas I and Sa'id, 1848-63
The reign of 'Abbas I (1848–54) indicates how precarious was the advance of westernization in Egypt. The effort had already been relaxed in the last decade of Muhammad 'AliTs rule, and 'Abbas showed himself to be a traditionalist. It was typical of his policy that he closed the school of languages and the translation bureau and sent their director, at-Tahtawi, to virtual exile in the Sudan. The French, who had played so large a part in Muhammad 'AliTs reforms, fell into disfavour, and for diplomatic support 'Abbas turned to their British rivals, whose support was needed against the Ottomans. Although initially 'Abbas was ostentatiously loyal to the Sultan, he resented an attempt made at this time to curtail his autonomy. The British, for their part, had their communications with India facilitated by the grant of a concession to build a railway from Alexandria to Cairo; the line was completed between 1851 and 1856 and was extended to Suez two years later. Sa'id (1854–63), who succeeded on 'Abbas' mysterious and violent death, inaugurated another reversal of policy. While he lacked Muhammad 'Ali's energy and ability, he was not unsympathetic to the westernizers. To his French friend Ferdinand de Lesseps (who had been a friend to Muhammad 'Ali as well) he granted in 1854 a concession for the cutting of a canal across the isthmus of Suez. This embroiled him both with the Sultan, whose prerogative had been encroached upon, and the British, whose overland railway route was threatened by the project; a deadlock lasted throughout his reign.
Isma'il, 1863–79
Isma'il, the son of Ibrahim Pasha, who succeeded on the death of Sa'id, displayed some of his grandfather's dynamic energy and enthusiasm for modernization. He lacked caution, however, and his reign ended in catastrophe. From his predecessors he inherited a precarious economy and a burden of debt. The American Civil War (1861–65) produced a boom in Egyptian long-staple cotton. This had been introduced and developed in Muhammad 'Ali's time, but its production had languished until the interruption of supplies of American cotton caused a fourfold increase in price during the war years. When peace returned, prices collapsed with disastrous consequences for the Egyptian economy. In the management of his finances, Isma'il was both extravagant and unwise and laid himself open to unscrupulous exploitation. Isma'il was committed to the Suez Canal project, but he modified the grant in two important respects: by withdrawing the cession of a strip of land from the Nile to the Suez isthmus, along which a freshwater canal was to be constructed, and by refusing to provide unlimited peasant labour for the project. The matter was submitted to arbitration; an indemnity of more than £3,000,000 was imposed on Isma'il, who also agreed to pay for a large block of shares put by de Lesseps to Sa'id's account. French pressure on the Sultan succeeded at last in overcoming resistance to the canal project at Istanbul, and a firman (decree from the sultan) authorizing its construction was granted in March 1866. Work had in fact already been going on for seven years, and in November 1869 the Suez Canal was opened to shipping by the empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III of France. The incident symbolized the political and cultural orientation of Egypt in the middle decades of the 19th century.
Isma'il, in other ways, presented himself as the ruler of a new and important state. Although his relations with his suzerain, Sultan Abdülaziz (1861–76), were normally friendly, he was no less anxious than his predecessors to secure the autonomy of his dynasty. In 1866 he obtained a firman establishing the succession by primogeniture in his own line—abandoning the contemporary Ottoman rule of succession by the eldest male. A year later a firman conferred upon Isma'il the special title of khedive, which had in fact been used unofficially since Muhammad 'Ali's time and which distinguished the viceroy of Egypt from other Ottoman governors. A period of strained relations developed between the Khedive and the Sultan arising from Isma'il's implied pretensions to sovereignty at the time of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, but the two were later reconciled; a firman reconfirmed the Khedive's privileges in 1873. These concessions by the Sultan, however, cost Isma'il heavy expenditure and an increase in the annual Egyptian tribute and formed another factor in the growth of Isma'il's indebtedness.
Isma'il had inherited an African empire in the northern Sudan. Since the middle of the century, in consequence of the abolition of the monopolies, merchants had penetrated south and southwest, up the White Nile and the Bahr al-Ghazal, in search of ivory. An ancillary slave trade had developed that was repugnant to the European conscience. Humanitarian and expansionist motives thus coincided to persuade Isma'il to extend Egyptian rule into these remoter regions. He made considerable use of expatriates, notably the Englishmen Sir Samuel Baker and Charles George (“Chinese”) Gordon, who extended the Khedive's nominal authority to the African Great Lakes. Another series of events led to the conquest in 1874 of the sultanate of Darfur in the west. The Khedive also wished to make Egypt the dominant power in the Red Sea region. The Sultan granted him the old Ottoman ports of Suakin and Mitsiwa in 1865. Egyptian control was established on the Somali coast, and in 1875 Harer was captured. Attempts to invade Abyssinia in 1875 and 1876 were, however, unsuccessful and marked the limits of Isma'il's imperial expansion.
Like other parts of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt was bound by the Capitulations—a system of privileges derived from ancient treaties with former sultans. Under the Capitulations, European and American residents in Egypt were exempt from local taxation and were subject only to their own consular courts. By patient negotiations over several years, Nubar Pasa, Isma'il's Armenian minister, succeeded in establishing the Mixed Courts in 1875. These had jurisdiction in cases involving Egyptians and foreigners, or foreigners of different nationalities, and had both foreign and Egyptian judges, who administered codes based on French law.
By this time the social consequences of the agrarian and political changes inaugurated by Muhammad 'Ali were clearly appearing. The Khedive and his family were the principal landholders in Egypt, possessing extensive personal estates quite apart from the state lands. Around the khedivial family was a parvenu aristocracy that held the principal civil and military offices. Many of its members were also great landowners; most of them were Turkish or Circassian by origin. Although the condition of the peasantry had been adversely affected by military conscription, by corvées for public works (including large-scale demands for labour on the railways and the Suez Canal), and by ill-considered economic and industrial experiments, the rights of cultivators on their land gradually increased. The richer peasants, from whom the village headmen were recruited, in particular increased in importance. When in November 1866 Isma'il set up the consultative council known as the Assembly of Delegates, the members of which were chosen by indirect election, the great majority of those chosen were village headmen. While Isma'il did not intend that the Assembly should limit his power, its establishment and composition were indications of the political development of the Egyptians in 60 years. Conscription had affected the political significance of the army. The ascendancy of the entrenched Turco-Circassians was challenged by native Egyptian officers, who resented the privileged position of their foreign colleagues. The defeat of the Circassian commander in chief, Ratib Pasha, by the Abyssinians in 1876 was a blow from which the prestige of the old officer group never recovered.
In the Assembly and the army, and among the westernized intelligentsia, politically conscious individuals and groups began to emerge who drew their ideas from both Western and Islamic sources. Their organization was for the most part small-scale and ephemeral, and their outlook was subversive, being hostile to the autocracy of the Khedive, the ascendancy of the Turco-Circassians, and the pervasive power of the Europeans.
Political tension increased in the last years of Isma'il's reign. Various expedients to postpone bankruptcy (e.g., the sale in 1875 of his Suez Canal shares to Britain) had failed, and in 1876 the Caisse de la Dette Publique (Commission of the Public Debt) was established for the service of the Egyptian debt. Its members were nominated by France, Britain, Austria, and Italy. In the same year, Egyptian revenue and expenditure were placed under the supervision of a British and a French controller (the Dual Control). After an international enquiry in 1878, Isma'il accepted the principle of ministerial responsibility for government and authorized the formation of an international ministry under Nubar. Isma'il, however, was not prepared to yield his autocracy tamely. In 1879 he profited from an army demonstration against the European ministers to dismiss Nubar, and he worked in alliance with the Assembly of Delegates to destroy international control over Egypt. By this time, however, his standing outside Egypt had been lost; and in June 1879, Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1908), at the instigation of France and Britain, deposed him in favour of his son, Tawfiq.
Renewed European intervention, 1879–82
European domination was immediately reasserted. The Dual Control was revived, the British controller being Evelyn Baring. By the Law of Liquidation (July 1880), the annual revenues were divided into two approximately equal portions, one of which was assigned to the Caisse de la Dette. The Assembly of Delegates was dissolved. The forces of resistance that Isma'il had stimulated were not, however, allayed by these means. There had already come into existence a nationalist group within the Assembly, prominent among whom was Sharif (Cherif) Pasha, prime minister from April to August 1879. In the army a group of Egyptian officers, whose leader was 'Urabi (Arabi) Pasha, was disaffected from the Khedive and resentful of European control of Egypt. By 1881 these two groups had allied to form the National Party, al-Hizb al-Watani.
Open tension appeared with a petition drawn up in January 1881 by 'Urabi and two of his colleagues against the war minister, Rifqi Pasha, a Circassian. They were arrested and court-martialed but released by mutineers. Tawfiq capitulated, dismissed Rifqi, and appointed BaIudi Pasha, one of 'Urabi's friends, as war minister. But the 'Urabists still felt themselves endangered; a military demonstration in Cairo in September 1881 compelled Tawfiq to appoint a new ministry under Sharif and to convoke the Assembly. But the alliance between the military group and Sharif was uneasy.
Meanwhile, the European powers were becoming increasingly alarmed. A joint English and French communication sent in January 1882 with the intention of strengthening the Khedive against his opponents had the contrary effect. The Assembly of Delegates swung toward the 'Urabists. Sharif resigned and Barudi became prime minister with 'Urabi as war minister. Rioting ensued on June 11 after British and French naval forces had been sent to Alexandria. From this point Britain took the initiative. The French refused participation in a bombardment of Alexandria (July 11), while an international conference held at Istanbul was boycotted by the Turks and produced no solution of the problem. The British government finally resolved on intervention and sent an expeditionary force to the Suez Canal. The 'Urabists were rapidly defeated at Tall al-Kabir (Sept. 13, 1882), and Cairo was occupied the next day.
The period of British domination (1882–1952)
The British occupation and the Protectorate (1882–1922)
The British occupation marked the culmination of developments that had been at work since 1798: the de facto separation of Egypt from the Ottoman Empire, the attempt of European powers to influence or control the country, and the rivalry of France and Britain for ascendancy in the country. Through the last minute withdrawal of the French, the British had secured the sole domination of Egypt. W.E. Gladstone's Liberal government was, however, reluctant to prolong the occupation or to establish formal political control, which it feared would antagonize both the Sultan and the other European powers; but the British were unwilling to evacuate Egypt without securing their strategic interests, and this never seemed possible without maintaining a military presence there.
An incident at the outset of the occupation was significant of future tensions. On British insistence, the Khedive's government was obliged to place 'Urabi and his associates on public trial and to commute the resulting death sentences to exile. Tawfiq's prestige, slight enough at his accession, and diminished in the three years before the occupation, was still further undermined by this intervention of the British government. Meanwhile, Lord Dufferin, the British ambassador in Istanbul, visited Egypt and prepared a report on measures to be taken for the reconstruction of the administrative system. The projects of reform that he envisaged would necessitate an indefinite continuation of the occupation. The implications of this for British policy were slowly and reluctantly accepted by the ministry in London, under pressure from its representative in Cairo, the British agent and consul general, Sir Evelyn Baring, who in 1891 became Lord Cromer.
Two principal problems confronted the occupying power: first, the acquisition of some degree of international recognition for its special but ambiguous position in Egypt; second, a definition of its relationship to the khedivial government, which formed the official administration of the country. The main European opponents of recognition of the British position were the French, who resented the abolition of the Dual Control (December 1882). The Caisse de la Dette remained in existence, and until 1904 the British had to tread warily in order to circumvent French opposition in this institution. In the early years of the occupation, when Egyptian finances were in disarray, French hostility was a serious problem, but from 1889 onward there was a budget surplus and consequently greater freedom of action for the Egyptian government. A moderate degree of international agreement over Egypt was attained by the Convention of London (1885), which secured an international loan for the Egyptian government and added two further members (nominated by Germany and Russia) to the Caisse de la Dette. In 1888 the Convention of Constantinople (Istanbul) provided that the Suez Canal should always be open in war and peace alike. This was, however, a statement of principle rather than fact; without British cooperation it remained a dead letter.
In matters concerning the international status of Egypt, the decisions were taken in London, but where the internal administration of the country was concerned, Cromer's opinions were usually conclusive. Although throughout the occupation the facade of khedivial government was retained, British advisers attached to the various ministries were more influential than their ministers, while Cromer himself steadily increased his control over the whole administrative machine.
Peter M. Holt
Tawfiq himself gave little trouble, but his prime ministers were more tenacious. Sharif Pasha, prime minister at the beginning of the occupation until 1884, and his successors Nubar Pasha (1884–88) and Riyad (Riaz) Pasha (1888–91) resigned because of clashes over administrative control. Thereafter, until November 1908, with a break in 1893–95, the prime minister was Mustafa Fahmi Pasha, who showed himself an obedient instrument of Cromer.
'Abbas Hilmi II, 1892–1914
The death of Tawfiq and the accession of his 17-year-old son, 'Abbas Hilmi II, in 1892 marked the beginning of a new phase of opposition to the occupation. The new khedive was not content to accept Cromer's tutelage, while the British agent resented the attempts of one so much his junior to play a serious role in Egyptian politics. 'Abbas dismissed Mustafa Fahmi in January 1893 and tried to appoint his own nominee as prime minister. Cromer, backed by the British government, frustrated his endeavours, and Fahmi returned to office in November 1895. 'Abbas provoked another crisis in January 1894 by public criticism of British military officers and especially H.H. Kitchener, the sirdar (commander in chief). Once again Cromer intervened, and 'Abbas was compelled to make amends.
Other considerations apart, the behaviour of 'Abbas in the early years of his reign indicated the emergence of a new generation who had only been children when the occupation began. One of 'Abbas' contemporaries was Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908), who had studied in France and then had entered a circle of Anglophobe writers and politicians. On returning to Egypt in 1894 he had reached an understanding with the Khedive on the basis of their common detestation of the British occupation. By his speeches and writings (in 1900 he founded his own newspaper, al-Liwa), he endeavoured to create an Egyptian patriotism that would rally the entire nation around the Khedive. A boost was given to nationalism by the campaigns for the reconquest of the Sudan (1896–98) and still more by the Condominium Agreement of 1899, which nominally gave Egypt and Britain joint responsibility for the administration of the reconquered territory but in effect made the Sudan a British possession.
A final episode in the reconquest of the Sudan, the confrontation of British and French at Fashoda on the White Nile in 1898, was followed by the reconciliation of the two powers in the Entente Cordiale (1904), which in effect gave Britain a free hand in Egypt. This was a blow to the hopes of Mustafa Kamil and to his alliance with the Khedive, who showed himself more willing to cooperate with Cromer. Mustafa Kamil now turned to Sultan Abdülhamid. When a dispute (the Tabah Incident, 1906) arose between the Ottomans and the occupying power over the Sinai Peninsula, Mustafa Kamil sought to rally Egyptian nationalist opinion in favour of the Sultan, but Mustafa Kamil died in 1908.
British domination in Egypt and Cromer's personal ascendancy never seemed more secure than in the period following the Entente Cordiale. But the “veiled protectorate” had hidden weaknesses. Cromer was both out of touch and out of sympathy with the new generation of Egyptians. The occupation had become to all intents and purposes permanent, and the consequent growth of the British official establishment created frustration among educated Egyptians. The British, however, saw themselves as the benefactors of the Egyptian peasantry, whom they had delivered from the corvée and the lash. The Dinshaway Incident showed them in another light. In June 1906 a fracas between villagers at Dinshaway and a party of British officers out pigeon shooting resulted in the death of a British officer. The special tribunal set up to try the matter imposed exemplary and brutal sentences on the villagers. In the bitter aftermath of this affair, Cromer retired in May 1907.
Sir Eldon Gorst, who succeeded Cromer, had served in Egypt from 1886 to 1904 and brought a fresh mind to bear on the problems of the occupation. He obtained an understanding with the Khedive and endeavoured to diminish the growing power and numbers of the British establishment. At the same time he tried to give more effective authority to Egyptian political institutions. Mustafa Fahmi's long premiership ended and he was followed by a Copt, Butrus Ghali Pasha. When Gorst died prematurely in July 1911, he had attained only limited success. Many British officials resented his policies, which at the same time failed to conciliate the nationalists. A project for the extension of the Suez Canal Company's 99-year concession by 40 years was thrown out by the General Assembly (a quasi-parliamentary body, set up in 1883), while Butrus Ghali, who had advocated it, was assassinated a few days later by a Muslim extremist. The appointment of Lord Kitchener to succeed Gorst portended the end of conciliation of the Khedive. But Kitchener, although autocratic, was not wholly conservative; his attempts to limit the power and influence of 'Abbas Hilmi served the interests of the nationalists. The Organic Law of 1913 created a new and more powerful Legislative Assembly that served as a training ground for the nationalist leaders of the postwar period. At the same time, the peasants were helped by improved agriculture and by legal protection of their holdings from seizure for debt.
World War I and independence
In November 1914 Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire and in December proclaimed a protectorate over Egypt, deposed 'Abbas, and appointed his uncle, Husayn Kamil, with the title of sultan. Kitchener was succeeded by Sir Henry MacMahon, and he by Sir Reginald Wingate, both with the title of high commissioner. Although Egypt was not required to provide troops, the people, and particularly the peasantry, suffered from the effects of war. The declaration of martial law and the suspension of the Legislative Assembly curbed the activities of middle-class nationalists. Husayn Kamil died in October 1917 and was succeeded by his ambitious brother, Ahmad Fu'ad.
On Nov. 13, 1918, two days after the Armistice, Wingate was visited by three Egyptian politicians headed by Sa'd Zaghlul Pasha. Zaghlul demanded autonomy for Egypt and announced his intention of leading a delegation (Arabic wafd) to state his case in England. The British government's refusal to accept a delegation, followed by the arrest of Zaghlul, produced a widespread revolt in Egypt; and Lord Allenby, the victor over the Turks in Palestine, was sent out as special high commissioner. Allenby insisted on concessions to the nationalists in the hopes of reaching a settlement. Zaghlul was released, and the Wafd, now a countrywide organization, dominated Egyptian politics. The Milner Commission (1919–20), sent to report on the establishment of constitutional government under the protectorate, was boycotted, but Milner subsequently had private talks with Zaghlul in London. Finally, hoping to outmaneuver Zaghlul and to build up a group of pro-British politicians in Egypt, Allenby pressed his government to promise independence without previously securing British interests by a treaty. The declaration of independence (Feb. 28, 1922) ended the protectorate but, pending negotiations, reserved four matters to the discretion of the British government: the security of imperial communications, defense, the protection of foreign interests and of minorities, and the Sudan. On March 15 the Sultan became King Fu'ad I of Egypt.
The Kingdom of Egypt (1922–52)
The new kingdom was in form a constitutional monarchy. The constitution, based on that of Belgium and promulgated in April 1923, defined the King's executive powers and established a bicameral legislature. An electoral law provided for universal male suffrage and the indirect election of deputies to the lower house: the Senate was half elected and half appointed. But Egyptian constitutionalism was as illusory as Egyptian independence. A political struggle was continually waged among three opportunist contestants—the King, the Wafd, and the British.
The interwar period
Fu'ad was never popular and felt insecure, and was therefore prepared to intrigue with the nationalists or with the British to secure his position and powers. The Wafd, with its mass following, elaborate organization, and (until his death in 1927) charismatic leader in Zaghlul, was the only truly national party in Egypt. Ideologically, it stood for national independence against British domination and for constitutional government against royal autocracy. In practice—and increasingly as time went on—its leaders were prepared to make deals with the British or the King to obtain or retain power. Personal and political rivalries led to the formation of splinter parties, the first of which, the Liberal Constitutionalist Party, broke off as early as 1922. The primary aim of the British government, represented by its high commissioner (after 1936, its ambassador), was to secure imperial interests, especially the control of communications through the Suez Canal. The need for a treaty to safeguard these interests led Britain on more than one occasion to conciliate nationalist feeling by supporting the Wafd against the King.
The first general election, in January 1924, gave the Wafd a majority, and Zaghlul became prime minister for a few months marked by unsuccessful treaty discussions with the British and tension with the King. When in November 1924 Sir Lee Stack, the sirdar and governor-general of the Sudan, was assassinated in Cairo, Allenby immediately presented an ultimatum that, though later modified by the British government, caused Zaghlul to resign. The general election of March 1925 left the Wafd still the strongest party, but the Parliament no sooner met than it was dissolved. For more than a year Egypt was governed by decree. The third general election, in May 1926, again gave the Wafd a majority. The British frowned on a return of Zaghlul to the premiership, and the office went instead to the Liberal Constitutionalist 'Adli Yegen (Yakan), while Zaghlul held the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies until his death in 1927. Once again tension developed between the Parliament and the King, and in April 1927 'Adli resigned, to be succeeded by another Liberal Constitutionalist, 'Abd al-Khaliq Tharwat (Sarwat) Pasha, who negotiated a draft treaty with the British foreign secretary. The draft treaty, however, failed to win the approval of the Wafd. Tharwat resigned (March 1928), and Mustafa an-Nahhas (Nahas) Pasha, Zaghlul's successor, became prime minister. But the King dismissed him in June and dissolved the Parliament in July. In effect, the constitution was suspended, and Egypt was again governed by decree under a Liberal Constitutionalist premier, Muhammad Mahmud Pasha.
Draft treaty proposals were agreed upon in June 1929, but since Mahmud was unable to overcome Wafdist opposition, British influence was thrown behind a return to constitutional government, hoping that a freely elected Parliament would approve the proposals. In the fourth general election (December 1929), the Wafd won a majority, and an-Nahhas again became prime minister. Resumed treaty negotiations broke down over the problem of the Sudan, from which the Egyptians had been virtually excluded since 1924. An-Nahhas also clashed with the King, whose influence he sought to curtail. He resigned in June 1930, and Fu'ad appointed Isma'il Sidqi (Sidki) Pasha to the premiership. The constitution of 1923 was abrogated, and another was promulgated by royal decree. This, with its accompanying electoral law, strengthened the King's power. By this and other measures, Sidqi sought to break the power of the Wafd, which boycotted the general election of June 1931. The strong government of Sidqi lasted until September 1933, when he was dismissed by the King. Thereafter, for more than a year, palace-appointed governments ruled Egypt.
But Fu'ad, whose health was failing, could not hold out indefinitely against the internal pressure of the Wafd and the external pressure of Britain, which was becoming increasingly anxious for a treaty with Egypt. In April 1935 the constitution of 1923 was restored, and a general election in May 1936 gave the Wafd a majority once more. Fu'ad had died in the previous month and was succeeded by his son Farouk (Faruq), still a minor. An-Nahhas became prime minister for the third time. Agreement was quickly reached with Britain, and a treaty of mutual defense and alliance was signed in August 1936. At the conference of Montreux, held in the following year, Egypt, with the backing of Britain, obtained the immediate abolition of the Capitulations and the extinction of the Mixed Courts after 12 years. In 1937 also, Egypt became a member of the League of Nations.
An-Nahhas had reached the height of his power, but he was soon to be overthrown. In July 1937 the young king Farouk came of age and assumed his full royal powers. He was both popular and ambitious to rule, and tension rapidly developed between him and his prime minister. A split developed in the Wafd: Mahmud Fahmi an-Nuqrashi (Nokrashy) Pasha and Ahmad Mahir (Maher) Pasha were expelled and formed the Sa'dist Group. The Wafdist youth movement, known as the Blueshirts, was opposed by the Greenshirts of Young Egypt, a fascist organization. In December 1937 King Farouk dismissed an-Nahhas. In the ensuing general election (April 1938), the Wafd won only 12 seats.
World War II and its aftermath
Although at the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 Egypt provided facilities for the British war effort, few Egyptians were enthusiastic supporters of Britain and many expected its defeat. In 1940 the British brought pressure on the King to dismiss his prime minister, 'Ali Mahir, and to appoint a more cooperative government. When, early in 1942, German forces prepared to invade Egypt, a second British intervention compelled King Farouk to accept an-Nahhas as prime minister. The Wafd, its power confirmed by overwhelming success in the general election of 1942, cooperated with Britain. Nevertheless, the intervention of February 1942 had disastrous consequences. It confirmed Farouk's hostility to both the British and an-Nahhas and tarnished the Wafd's pretensions as the standard-bearer of Egyptian nationalism. The Wafd was damaged also by internal rivalries.
An-Nahhas was dismissed by the King in October 1944. His successor, Ahmad Mahir, was acceptable to the British, but he was assassinated in February 1945, at the moment of Egypt's declaration of war on Germany and Japan. He was succeeded by a Sa'dist, an-Nuqrashi Pasha.
At the end of World War II, Egypt was in a thoroughly unstable condition. The Wafd declined and its political opponents took up the nationalist demand for a revision of the treaty of 1936—in particular for the complete evacuation of British troops from Egypt and the ending of British control in the Sudan. Politics was passing into the hands of radicals. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, developed from an orthodox Islamic reformist movement into a militant mass organization. Demonstrations in Cairo became increasingly frequent and violent. The pressure rendered it impossible for any Egyptian government to attempt a settlement of its two main external problems: the need to revise the treaty with Britain, and the wish to support the Arab cause in Palestine. Negotiations with Britain, undertaken by an-Nuqrashi and (after February 1946) by his successor, Sidqi, broke down over the British refusal to prejudice the possible independence of the Sudan. Although Egypt referred the dispute to the United Nations in July 1947, the deadlock continued.
Until the interwar period neither the Egyptian public nor the politicians had shown much interest in Arab affairs generally; Egyptian nationalism had developed as an indigenous response to local conditions. After 1936, however, Egypt became involved in the Palestine problem, and in 1943–44 it played a leading part in the formation of the Arab League. After World War II, Egypt became increasingly committed to the Arab cause in Palestine, but its unexpected and crushing defeat in the first Arab–Israeli War (1948–49), which had been launched with Syria, Iraq, and Jordan in response to the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948, contributed to disillusionment and political instability. The Muslim Brotherhood increased its terrorist activities. An-Nuqrashi, again prime minister, endeavoured to suppress the organization and was assassinated in December 1948. The Brotherhood's leader was murdered two months later.
A general election in January 1950 gave the Wafd a majority, and an-Nahhas again formed a government. Failing to reach agreement with Britain, in October 1951 he abrogated both the 1936 treaty and the Condominium Agreement of 1899. Anti-British demonstrations were followed by guerrilla warfare against the British garrison in the Canal Zone. British military action in Ismailia was followed on Jan. 26, 1952, by the burning of Cairo by demonstrators. An-Nahhas was dismissed, and there were four prime ministers in the ensuing six months.
Peter M. Holt
Ed.
The revolution and the Republic
The Nasser regime
At mid-century Egypt was ripe for revolution. Political groupings of both right and left pressed for radical alternatives. From an array of contenders for power, it was a movement of military conspirators—the Free Officers led by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser—that toppled the monarchy in a coup in July 1952. In broad outline, the history of contemporary Egypt is the story of this coup, which preempted a revolution but then itself became a revolution from above. For three decades rule by Free Officers brought just enough advance at home and enhancement of standing abroad to make Egypt an island of stability in a turbulent Middle East.
The coup of July 1952 was fueled by a powerful but vague Egyptian nationalism rather than by a coherent ideology. It yielded a regime whose initially reformist character was given more precise form by a domestic power struggle and by the necessity of coming to terms with the British, who still occupied their base at Suez.
The domestic challenge to Nasser came in February–April 1954 from Gen. Mohammad Naguib, an older officer who served as figurehead for the Free Officers. Political parties had been abolished in January 1953. To supplement his power base in the military forces, Nasser drew on the police and on working-class support mobilized by the newly created mass political organization called the National Union. The small middle class, the former political parties, and the Muslim Brotherhood all rallied to Naguib. Nasser's triumph meant that a strong reliance on the military and security apparatus, coupled with carefully controlled manipulation of the civilian population, would be basic to the new system of rule.
Obscured in the West was Nasser's initial moderation regarding Egypt's key foreign policy challenges—the Sudan, the British presence, and Israel. An agreement signed in 1954 established a transitional period of self-government for the Sudan, which became an independent republic in January 1956. Prolonged negotiations yielded the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1954, under which British troops were to be evacuated gradually from the Canal Zone. Some Egyptians were critical, finding the treaty unsatisfactory from an Egyptian nationalist perspective. An attempt to assassinate Nasser by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in October 1954 was used as a pretext to crush that organization.
In retrospect, it is clear that Nasser was the reluctant champion of the Arab struggle against Israel. Domestic development was his priority. A dangerous pattern of violent interactions, however, was evolving that would eventually draw the Egyptians into conflict with Israel. Small groups of Palestinian raiders, including some operating from Egyptian-controlled Gaza, were infiltrating Israel's borders. In October 1953 the Israeli government initiated the policy of large-scale retaliation that it pursued thereafter. One such strike—an attack on Gaza in February 1955 that left 38 Egyptians dead—exposed the military weakness of the Free Officer regime.
In September 1955 Nasser announced that an arms agreement had been signed between Egypt and Czechoslovakia (acting for the Soviet Union). The way to improved Soviet–Egyptian relations had been prepared by Nasser's refusal to join the Baghdad Pact (the Middle East Treaty Organization, later known as the Central Treaty Organization), which had been formed earlier that year by Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom, with the support of the United States, to counter the threat of Soviet expansion. With the arms agreement of 1955, the Soviet Union eluded efforts to contain its actions and established itself as a force in the Middle East.
The erosion of Nasser's initially pro-Western orientation was accelerated further by the denial of funds previously promised by the United States and Britain for the construction of a high dam at Aswan. Defiantly, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company in 1956 to finance the dam. In its subsequent attack on Egypt in October 1956, Israel was joined by the British, who were enraged by the nationalization, and the French, who were angered by Egyptian aid to the revolt in Algeria. Pressure on the invading powers by the United States and the Soviet Union, however, soon ended the so-called Suez War, leaving Nasser triumphant (despite his military losses) and with the Suez Canal firmly in Egyptian hands.
Nasser, who had been elected president in June 1956, pursued a more radical line in the decade following the Suez War. He launched an ambitious program of domestic transformation, a revolution from above that was paralleled by a drive for Egyptian leadership in the Arab world. Early in 1958 Egypt combined with Syria to form the United Arab Republic (U.A.R.), but it was a reluctant marriage of convenience and was dissolved in bitterness in September 1961 (Egypt retained the name United Arab Republic until 1971). The secession of Syria was blamed by Nasser on Syrian “reactionaries,” and in direct response he pushed the revolution in Egypt further to the left. The following spring a National Charter proclaimed that Egypt's would be a regime of “scientific socialism” with a new mass organization, the Arab Socialist Union (ASU), to function in place of the National Union.
Impressive domestic gains were registered. In 1950 industry contributed 10 percent to the total national output; by 1970 that figure had increased to 21 percent. Unfortunately, these achievements in industry were not matched in agriculture, and they were further undercut by rapid population growth.
Throughout this period the potential military danger from Israel was a constant factor in the calculations of the U.A.R. government. It was a motive in strengthening ties with the Soviet bloc and producing a series of initiatives for cooperation among the Arab states, which, however, were disappointing. Nasser masked essential Egyptian moderation on the Israeli issue with a militant rhetoric of confrontation that was necessary to preserve his standing in the Arab world.
The failure of the union with Syria had been a blow to Nasser's pan-Arab standing. To regain the initiative, Nasser intervened in 1962–67 on the republican side of the Yemeni civil war. That intervention provoked conflict with Saudi Arabia, which supported the Yemeni royalists, and with the United States, which in turn supported the Saudis. Until then, Nasser had managed to obtain impressive aid from both the Soviet Union and the United States. Because of Egyptian intervention in the Yemen, U.S. aid was cut off in the mid-1960s.
This series of reversals was one key factor in the mood of desperation that pushed Nasser to abandon his policy of “militant inaction” toward Israel. For 10 years relative peace on the border with Israel was precariously maintained by the presence of a UN Emergency Force (UNEF) stationed on the Egyptian side. In the Arab summit conferences of the early 1960s Nasser had counseled restraint, but in 1966 events eluded his control. Palestinian incursions against Israel were launched with greater frequency and intensity from bases in Jordan, Lebanon, and, especially, Syria. A radical Syrian regime openly pledged support to the Palestinian guerrilla raids. On Nov. 13, 1966, an Israeli strike into Jordan left 18 dead and 54 wounded. Taunted openly for hiding behind the UNEF, Nasser was forced to act. The Egyptian president requested the withdrawal of the UNEF from the Sinai border. But that would include, as the United Nations interpreted the order, the removal of UN troops stationed at Sharm ash-Shaykh at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba. The posting of Egyptian troops there would mean the closing of the gulf to the Israelis.
Israel had made it clear that the closing of the gulf would be a cause for war. On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a preemptive attack on Egypt and Jordan later known as the June (or Six-Day) War. All of Egypt's airfields were struck, and the bulk of Egyptian planes were demolished on the ground. In the Sinai, Egyptian forces were defeated and put to flight. An estimated 10,000 Egyptians died. The Israelis reached the Suez Canal on June 9. Egypt was crushed and Nasser resigned. A popular outpouring of support, only partially manipulated by the government, refused the President's resignation. But the Nasser era was, in fact, over. In both domestic and foreign affairs, Nasser began a turn to the right that his successor, Anwar el-Sadat, was to accelerate sharply.
The Sadat regime
Nasser died on Sept. 28, 1970, and was succeeded by his vice president, Sadat, himself a Free Officer. Although regarded at the time as an interim figure, Sadat soon revealed unexpected gifts for political survival. In May 1971 he outmaneuvered a formidable combination of rivals for power, calling his victory the “Corrective Revolution.” Sadat then used his strengthened position to manage a war with Israel in October 1973, thereby setting the stage for a new era in Egypt's history.
The Sadat era really began with the October (or Yom Kippur) War of 1973. The concerted Syrian–Egyptian surprise attack on October 6 surprised not only Israel but also the world. There were no illusions that Israel could be vanquished. Rather, the war was launched with the diplomatic aim of convincing a chastened, if still undefeated, Israel to negotiate on terms more favourable to the Arabs. Preparation for the war involved a loosening of ties with the Soviet Union; to that end, in July 1972 Sadat had announced the withdrawal of all Soviet military advisers who, it was claimed later, had opposed the Egyptian determination to fight.
Egypt did not win the war of 1973 in any military sense. As soon as Israel recovered from the initial shock of Arab gains in the first few days of fighting—and once the United States abandoned its early equivocation and resupplied Israel with a massive airlift—the Israelis demonstrated their military superiority. A cease-fire was secured by the United States.
Still, the initial successes in October 1973 were sufficient to allow Sadat to pronounce the war an Egyptian victory and to openly and honourably seek peace. Egyptian interests, as Sadat saw them, dictated peace with Israel. Despite almost immediate difficulties with his Syrian allies, Sadat signed the Sinai I (1974) and Sinai II (1975) disengagement agreements that returned Sinai and secured large foreign assistance commitments to Egypt. When Israeli inflexibility combined with Arab resistance to slow events, Sadat made his dramatic journey to Jerusalem on Nov. 19, 1977, to address the Israeli Knesset (Parliament). The subsequent meeting in September 1978 of Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and U.S. Pres. Jimmy Carter at Camp David, Md., led directly to the Israeli–Egyptian peace treaty of March 26, 1979. The treaty provided for Egyptian–Israeli normalization and established a framework for the Palestinian issue. Its provisions included the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces and civilians from Sinai within three years, special security arrangements in Sinai, a buffer zone along the Sinai–Israel border to be manned by United Nations peacekeeping forces, the exchange of ambassadors, and the establishment of normal economic and cultural relations. The status of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza territories and the question of Palestinian autonomy were to be negotiated.
Sadat linked his peace initiative to the task of economic reconstruction, and an open-door policy was proclaimed. A liberalized Egyptian economy would be revitalized by the inflow of Western and Arab capital. The peace process did produce economic benefits, notably a vast U.S. aid program, begun in 1975, that reached more than $1,000,000,000 a year by the 1980s.
The Sadat peace with Israel was not without its costs, however. As the narrowness of the Israeli interpretation of Palestinian autonomy under the Camp David agreement became clear, Sadat found it impossible to convince the Arab world that the accords dealt justly with legitimate Palestinian rights. Egypt lost the financial support of the Arab states and, shortly after signing the peace treaty, was expelled from the Arab League.
At home democratization of political life did not prove to be an acceptable substitute for economic revitalization. On Jan. 18–19, 1977, demonstrations provoked by economic hardship broke out in Egypt's major cities. An estimated 79 persons were killed, 1,000 were wounded, and 1,250 were jailed. The removal of the most oppressive features of Nasser's rule, the return in controlled form to a multiparty system, and (at least initially) the Sadat peace with Israel were all welcomed. But, as Egypt entered the 1980s, the lack of progress on the Palestinian issue and the failure to relieve mass economic hardships, heightened by widening class gaps, threatened to destabilize the Sadat regime. In the West, Sadat's international role initially obscured these danger signs. Then, in September 1981, his arrest of more than 1,300 of the political elite of Egypt signaled the precariousness of his position.
Egypt after Sadat
Sadat's assassination on Oct. 6, 1981, by members of the radical fringe of the Muslim religious opposition was greeted in Egypt by a deafening calm. It was with a profound sense of relief that Egyptians brought Hosni Mubarak, Sadat's handpicked vice president, to power with a mandate for cautious change. As an air force general and hero of the October War, Mubarak had played an important role in Sadat's rule from the early 1970s.
Raymond William Baker
During his first year as president, Mubarak struck a moderate note. There was no backing away from the peace with Israel and no loosening of the connection to the United States. By pursuing that steady course, he was able to prevent any delay in the return of the occupied Sinai to Egyptian sovereignty in April 1982. At the same time, Mubarak tried to contain the disaffections that had surfaced in the last year of Sadat's era. He announced the end of the reign of the privileged minority that had dominated the invigorated private sector during the Sadat years. He also moved immediately to soften the harsh edges of the authoritarianism of Free Officer rule. Unfortunately, Egypt's worsening economic problems did not lend themselves to rapid improvement. But in his very first speeches Mubarak did frankly and perceptively outline the shortcomings of the Egyptian economy.
These solid beginnings were undercut by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. In Egypt the invasion was perceived as an Israeli attempt to destroy Palestinian nationalism, and Mubarak was accused by his detractors of allowing Israel to take advantage of Egypt's position of disengagement. Official relations with Israel were severely strained until the latter initiated its partial withdrawal from Lebanon in 1985. As a result of Mubarak's cautious policies, on the other hand, Egypt gradually was able to repair its relationships with most of the moderate Arab nations.
Within the country, opposition to a variety of political, economic, and social policies continued, chiefly among discontented labour and religious groups. The government contained labour strikes and other incidents of unrest and adopted several measures aimed at curbing a determined drive by Islamic fundamentalists to destabilize the regime.
Egypt's economy suffered markedly from a sharp decline in oil prices in 1986 and was further weakened by a drop in the number of remittances from workers abroad. In spite of a rising burden of debt, the government continued to rely heavily on foreign economic aid.
Raymond William Baker
Derek Hopwood
Ed.
Additional Reading
General works
Overviews are provided by Richard F. Nyrop (ed.), Egypt: A Country Study, 4th ed. (1983), covering the history, society, economy, and politics; Shirley Kay, The Egyptians: How They Live and Work (1975), an introductory survey of Egypt's geography, history, government, and culture, as well as transportation; Jasper More, The Land of Egypt (1980), an illustrated general description of the country; and Ahmed Fakhry, The Oases of Egypt, 2 vol. (1973), a description of the oases of the Western Desert.
Geography
The land
W.B. Fisher, The Middle East: A Physical, Social, and Regional Geography, 7th rev. ed. (1978), basic geographical information; M.S. Abu al-'Izz, Landforms of Egypt, trans. from Arabic (1971), a detailed outline of physiographic regionalization; Martin A.J. Williams and Hugues Faure (eds.), The Sahara and the Nile: Quaternary Environments and Prehistoric Occupation in Northern Africa (1980), a detailed geologic and anthropological study. Other specialized works include Rushdi Said, The Geology of Egypt (1962), and The Geological Evolution of the River Nile (1981); as well as Tom Little, High Dam at Aswan: The Subjugation of the Nile (1965); and Julian Rzóska, The Nile: Biology of an Ancient River (1976), containing discussion of the biological effects of the Aswan High Dam. On plants and animals, see Vivi Täckholm, Gunnar Täckholm, and Mohammed Drar, Flora of Egypt, 4 vol. (1941–69, reprinted 1973), the standard work on the subject; Richard Meinertzhagen, Nicoll's Birds of Egypt, 2 vol. (1930), a primary source, copiously illustrated; and John Anderson, William E. De Winton, and George A. Boulenger, Zoology of Egypt, 3 vol. in 4 (1898–1907, reprinted 1965), an authoritative and amply illustrated standard work. Henry Habib Ayrout, The Fellaheen (1945, reprinted 1981; originally published in French, 1938), contains observations on the customs, dress, and psychology of the Egyptian peasant; and Hamid Ammar, Growing Up in an Egyptian Village (1954, reissued 1973), is an excellent and full account of village life in Egypt.
The people
Abbas M. Ammar, The People of Sharqiya, 2 vol. (1944), a physical anthropologist's description of the inhabitants of the eastern Delta; Robert A. Fernea, Nubians in Egypt: Peaceful People (1973), an illustrated ethnographic essay; and Anwar G. Chejne, The Arabic Language: Its Role in History (1969), a discussion of the background of classical Arabic and the dichotomy between it and the various dialects. William H. Worrell, A Short Account of the Copts (1945), is a concise study of the indigenous Christian population of Egypt. Other studies of religions of Egypt include Otto F.A. Meinardus, Christian Egypt, Ancient and Modern, 2nd rev. ed. (1977), on the Christian communities; Morroe Berger, Islam in Egypt Today: Social and Political Aspects of Popular Religion (1970); and G.H. Jansen, Militant Islam (1979). For a popular introduction to the religions of Egypt, see Veronica Ions, Egyptian Mythology, new ed. (1983).
The economy
Robert L. Tignor, State, Private Enterprise, and Economic Change in Egypt, 1918–1952 (1984); Robert Mabro, The Egyptian Economy, 1952–1972 (1974); Robert Mabro and Samir Radwan, The Industrialization of Egypt, 1939–1973: Policy and Performance (1976); Kasim Alrimawi (Qasim Rimawi), The Challenge of Industrialization, Egypt (1974); Charles Issawi, Egypt in Revolution: An Economic Analysis (1963, reprinted 1986); Mostafa H. Nagi, Labor Force and Employment in Egypt: A Demographic and Socioeconomic Analysis (1971); Rashed al-Barawy, Economic Development in the United Arab Republic: Egypt (1972); K.M. Barbour, The Growth, Location, and Structure of Industry in Egypt (1972); Maurice Girgis, Industrialization and Trade Patterns in Egypt (1977); Yusuf J. Ahmad, Absorptive Capacity of the Egyptian Economy: An Examination of Problems and Prospects (1976); David William Carr, Foreign Investment and Development in Egypt (1979); Khalid Ikram, Egypt, Economic Management in a Period of Transition (1980); and John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (1983).
Administrative and social conditions
Harold F. Alderfer, M. Fathalla El Khatib, and Moustafa Ahmed Fahmy, Local Government in the United Arab Republic (1963); Morroe Berger, Bureaucracy and Society in Modern Egypt (1957, reprinted 1969); and P.J. Vatikiotis, The Egyptian Army in Politics: Pattern for New Nations? (1961, reprinted 1975). See also Frank Tachau (ed.), Political Elites and Political Development in the Middle East (1975); Enid Hill, Mahkama!: Studies in the Egyptian Legal System: Courts & Crimes, Law & Society (1979); James B. Mayfield, Local Institutions and Egyptian Rural Development (1974); and Helmi R. Tadros, Rural Resettlement in Egypt's Reclaimed Lands (1978). On education, see Amir Boktor, The Development and Expansion of Education in the United Arab Republic (1963), an important general survey; Bayard Dodge, Al-Azhar: A Millennium of Muslim Learning (1961, reissued 1974); and Georgie D.M. Hyde, Education in Modern Egypt: Ideals and Realities (1978). Other works on social conditions include Tom Little, Modern Egypt (1967), a study of social and political structures; Peter Mansfield, Nasser's Egypt, 2nd ed. (1969), a clear and orderly description of political, economic, and social changes in Egypt after 1952; Unni Wikan, Life Among the Poor in Cairo (1980; originally published in Norwegian, 1976); Abdel R. Omran (ed.), Egypt: Population Problems & Prospects (1973); Saad M. Gadalla, Land Reform in Relation to Social Development, Egypt (1962), and Is There Hope?: Fertility and Family Planning in a Rural Egyptian Community (1978); and Andrea B. Rugh, Family in Contemporary Egypt (1984).
Cultural life
Mustafa Habib (ed.), Cultural Life in the United Arab Republic (1968); Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (1962, reissued 1983), a study of the interaction of Western and indigenous culture in its historical context; Jacob M. Landau, Studies in the Arab Theatre and Cinema (1958); Abd al-Monem Ismail, Drama and Society in Contemporary Egypt (1967); Farouk Abdel Wahab (comp.), Modern Egyptian Drama (1974); Abdel-Aziz Abdel-Meguid, The Modern Arabic Short Story: Its Emergence, Development, and Form (1950?); Hamdi Sakkut, The Egyptian Novel and Its Main Trends from 1913 to 1952 (1971); and Hilary Kilpatrick, The Modern Egyptian Novel: A Study in Social Criticism (1974). Other studies include Mouhan A. Khouri, Poetry and the Making of Modern Egypt, 1882–1922 (1971); Yves Thoraval, Regards sur le cinéma Égyptien (1975), on the Egyptian cinema; and Pierre Du Bourguet, Coptic Art (1971, originally published in French, 1968).
History
Ancient Egypt
The most detailed presentation of Egyptian history, with full bibliographies arranged by subject, is the multivolume Cambridge Ancient History, though volumes 1 and 2 no longer reflect current knowledge. Wolfgang Helck, Eberhard Otto, and Wolhart Westendorf (eds.), Lexikon der Ägyptologie (1975– ), is the basic reference work in Egyptology, of which 5 volumes had appeared by 1986, with further parts published in fascicles. Michael A. Hoffman, Egypt Before the Pharaohs: The Prehistoric Foundations of Egyptian Civilization (1979, reissued 1984), is a comprehensive general work on prehistory; while Lech Krzyzaniak, Early Farming Cultures on the Lower Nile: The Predynastic Period in Egypt (1977), focuses on the transition to agriculture and on Lower Egypt. General studies include Cyril Aldred, The Egyptians, rev. ed. (1984); and John Ruffle, Heritage of the Pharaohs: An Introduction to Egyptian Archaeology (1977); as well as other works cited below under the specific periods on which they focus. General histories include B.G. Trigger et al., Ancient Egypt: A Social History (1983), containing four essays on the main periods, concentrating on relations with Africa, and including valuable bibliographies; and Sir Alan Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs (1961), a personal history, notable for the use made of ancient Egyptian texts. William W. Hallo and William Kelly Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History (1971), is a reliable brief introduction; and Étienne Drioton and Jacques Vandier, L'Égypte: des origines à la conquête d'Alexandre, 4th ed. (1962, reprinted 1984), remains valuable for its critical discussions. John A. Wilson, The Burden of Egypt: An Interpretation of Ancient Egyptian Culture (1951, reprinted 1965), is a selective historical study. William C. Hayes, The Scepter of Egypt, 2 vol. (1953–59), is a detailed cultural history of Egypt to the end of the 20th dynasty, based on the collections in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Wolfgang Helck, Geschichte des alten Ägypten (1968, reprinted 1981), is still the best general history; his Beziehungen Ägyptens zu Vorderasien im 3. und 2. Jahrtausend v. Chr., 2nd ed. (1971), is the fundamental work on foreign relations, and his Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Alten Ägypten im 3. und 2. Jahrtausend vor Chr. (1975), covers institutions and economics. Rolf Krauss, Sothis- und Monddaten: Studien zur astronomischen und technischen Chronologie Altägyptens (1985), is a vital chronological study for the 2nd and 1st millennia BC; its dates are adopted in this article with minor variations. John Baines and Jaromír Málek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt (1980), is a concise, geographically oriented survey. Hermann Kees, Ancient Egypt: A Cultural Topography (1961, reprinted 1977; originally published in German, 2nd ed., 1958; 3rd German ed., 1977), studies a number of major sites in depth. Karl W. Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cultural Ecology (1976), is a useful discussion of geographic and environmental conditions and their relation to the development of ancient Egyptian civilization. Claude Vandersleyen et al., Das alte Ägypten (1975), is the most comprehensive survey of Egyptian art. W. Stevenson Smith, The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, rev. ed., edited by William Kelly Simpson (1981), is an excellent general account; and for the Old Kingdom, Smith's History of Egyptian Sculpture and Painting in the Old Kingdom, 2nd ed. (1949), is still a fundamental source. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings, 3 vol. (1973–80), offers an excellent collection of texts in translation, covering the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms and the Late Period. A smaller selection of readings is available in William Kelly Simpson (ed.), The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, and Poetry, new ed. (1973); while James B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (1969), contains a wide selection of Egyptian material in translation. Studies of administration include Klaus Baer, Rank and Title in the Old Kingdom (1960, reprinted 1974); to which Nigel Strudwick, The Administration of Egypt in the Old Kingdom: The Highest Titles and Their Holders (1985), adds a vast amount of detail. Wolfgang Helck, Zur Verwaltung des Mittleren und Neuen Reichs (1958), with a separately published index volume (1975), is the basic work on the succeeding periods.
Egypt from the 18th dynasty to 332 BC
The rise of the New Kingdom is treated in Jürgen Von Beckerath, Untersuchungen zur politischen Geschichte der Zweiten Zwischenzeit in Ägypten (1964). Donald B. Redford, History and Chronology of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt: Seven Studies (1967), includes a reevaluation of Hatshepsut. An informative account of the New Kingdom empire at its height is Elizabeth Riefstahl, Thebes in the Time of Amunhotep III (1964, reprinted 1971). For the controversial Amarna period, Rolf Krauss, Das Ende der Amarnazeit: Beitr. zur Geschichte u. Chronologie d. Neuen Reiches (1978); and Donald B. Redford, Akhenaten, the Heretic King (1984), offer strongly contrasting interpretations. Cyril Aldred, Akhenaten and Nefertiti (1973), is a good collection of the artistic evidence for the period. For the Ramesside period, K.A. Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II King of Egypt (1982), sets its subject in context, presenting the New Kingdom in general as well as Ramses' own reign. Edward F. Wente, Late Ramesside Letters (1967), deals with material from the end of the same period. For the economy of this time, see the major work of J.J. Janssen, Commodity Prices from the Ramessid Period: An Economic Study of the Village of Necropolis Workmen at Thebes (1975). John Romer, Ancient Lives: Daily Life in Egypt of the Pharaohs (1984), presents the life of the same community. T.G.H. James, Pharaoh's People: Scenes from Life in Imperial Egypt (1984), is concerned with lifestyles of higher ranks of society in the same general period. K.A. Kitchen, The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt (1100–650 B.C.), 2nd rev. ed. (1986), is the basic work on the period. Hermann Kees, Das Priestertum im ägyptischen Staat, vom neuen Reich bis zur Spätzeit (1953), with an index volume, Indices und Nachträge (1958), is a comprehensive analysis of the Egyptian priesthoods. This fundamental institution of the Late Period is also valuably treated in Serge Sauneron, The Priests of Ancient Egypt (1960, reprinted 1980; originally published in French, 1957). On the period from the Saite 26th dynasty until Alexander the Great, see Friedrich K. Kienitz, Die politische Geschichte Ägyptens vom 7. bis 4. Jahrhundert vor der Zeitwende (1953), based on both Egyptian and classical sources. Alan B. Lloyd, Herodotus, Book II, 2 vol. (1975–76), contains much material on the Late Period.
Hellenistic and Roman Egypt
On the period in general, see Harold I. Bell, Egypt, from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest: A Study in the Diffusion and Decay of Hellenism (1948, reprinted 1980); and Alan K. Bowman, Egypt After the Pharaohs, 332 B.C.–A.D. 642: From Alexander to the Arab Conquest (1986). The basic general works on the papyri are L. Mitteis and U. Wilcken, Grundzüge und Chrestomathie der Papyruskunde, 2 vol. in 4 (1912, reprinted 1963); and E.G. Turner, Greek Papyri: An Introduction (1968, reissued 1980), with its illustrated companion, Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World (1971). On Ptolemaic Egypt, see Dorothy J. Crawford, Kerkeosiris: An Egyptian Village in the Ptolemaic Period (1971); P.M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 3 vol. (1972); J. Grafton Milne, A History of Egypt Under Roman Rule, 3rd rev. ed. (1924); Orsolina Montevecchi, La papirologia (1973); Alan E. Samuel, From Athens to Alexandria: Hellenism and Social Goals in Ptolemaic Egypt (1983); Naphtali Lewis, Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt: Case Studies in the Social History of the Hellenistic World (1986); E.E. Rice, The Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus (1983); M. Rostovtzeff, The Social & Economic History of the Hellenistic World, 3 vol. (1941, reprinted with corrections 1972); and Sarah B. Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt: From Alexander to Cleopatra (1984). On Roman Egypt, see A.C. Johnson, Roman Egypt to the Reign of Diocletian, vol. 2 in Tenney Frank (ed.), An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, 6 vol. (1933–40, reprinted 1975); A.H.M. Jones, The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces, 2nd ed. (1971, reprinted 1983); and Naphtali Lewis, Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule (1983). On Byzantine Egypt, see Alfred J. Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion, 2nd ed., revised by P.M. Fraser (1978); Edward Rochie Hardy, The Large Estates of Byzantine Egypt (1931, reprinted 1968), and Christian Egypt: Church and People: Christianity and Nationalism in the Patriarchate of Alexandria (1952); Allan Chester Johnson and Louis C. West, Byzantine Egypt: Economic Studies (1949, reprinted 1967); and Colin H. Roberts, Manuscript, Society, and Belief in Early Christian Egypt (1979).
Egypt from c. 630 to c. 1800
Two standard works that survey medieval Egyptian history as a whole are Stanley Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages, 4th ed. (1968); and Gaston Wiet, L'Égypte arabe de la conquête arabe à la conquête ottomane, 642–1517 de l'ère chrétienne, vol. 4 in Gabriel Hanotaux, Histoire de la nation égyptienne, 7 vol. (1931–40). Each of these is outdated in many respects, but each presents an accurate summary of the political history of the period, based on primary Arabic sources; also, both are strong on Egyptian architecture as an insight into political, social, and economic history. A valuable later reference source with comprehensive coverage of the period is Joan Wucher King, Historical Dictionary of Egypt (1984). For the economic history, see Subhi Labib, Handelsgeschichte Ägyptens im Spätmittelalter, 1171–1517 (1965); Labib has summarized this book in English in the form of an article, “Egyptian Commercial Policy in the Middle Ages,” in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East: From the Rise of Islam to the Present Day, edited by M.A. Cook, pp. 63–77 (1970). Eliyahu Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages (1976), and Levant Trade in the Later Middle Ages (1983), are also important. Aziz S. Atiya, A History of Eastern Christianity (1968, reissued 1980), is authoritative for Coptic history. For the beginnings of Muslim Egypt, see Francesco Gabrieli, Muhammad and the Conquests of Islam (1968, originally published in Italian, 1967), for the conquest of Egypt; and Daniel C. Dennett, Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam (1950), for Muslim tax policy in Egypt. For the Tulunids, see Zaky Mohamed Hasan, Les Tulunides (1933). Fatimid studies have been transformed by S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (1968– ), of which four volumes had appeared by 1987. Three articles by Hamilton A.R. Gibb are definitive for Egypt under the Ayyubids and during the Crusades, all published in A History of the Crusades, ed. by Kenneth M. Setton, 2nd ed., 5 vol. (1958–85): “The Caliphate and the Arab States,” 1:81–98; “The Rise of Saladin, 1169–1189,” 1:563–589; and “The Aiyubids,” 2:693–714. See also R. Stephen Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193–1260 (1977). For Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt, see F.R.C. Bagley (ed. and trans.), The Last Great Muslim Empires, vol. 3 in The Muslim World: A Historical Survey, 3 vol. (1960–69, originally published in German, 1952–59). An account of the early Mamluk state is found in Robert Irwin, The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate, 1250–1382 (1986); and for the Ottoman period alone, see Stanford J. Shaw, The Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt, 1517–1798 (1962).
Egypt since 1800
Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 2 vol. (1836, reissued in 1 vol., 1973), is a classic study of everyday life during the second quarter of the 19th century. An analysis of the political developments of the period is offered in F. Robert Hunter, Egypt Under the Khedives, 1805–1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy (1984). Jamal M. Ahmed, The Intellectual Origins of Egyptian Nationalism (1960, reissued 1968), is particularly concerned with the nationalists of the period from 1892 to 1914. Other useful works are Gabriel Baer, A History of Landownership in Modern Egypt, 1800–1950 (1962); P.M. Holt, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, 1516–1922 (1966), and P.M. Holt (ed.), Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt (1968); Jacob M. Landau, Parliaments and Parties in Egypt (1953, reissued 1979); Helen Anne B. Rivlin, The Agricultural Policy of Muhammad 'Ali in Egypt (1961); Afaf Lufti Al-sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (1984), a sturdy defense by an Egyptian author; Robert L. Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882–1914 (1966); and Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community: An Analysis of the Intellectual and Political Evolution of Egypt, 1804–1952 (1961, reprinted 1981). P.J. Vatikiotis, Nasser and His Generation (1978), offers a fine biography, especially for the years between 1930 and 1952; Raymond W. Baker, Egypt's Uncertain Revolution Under Nasser and Sadat (1978), analyzes the effect of the Egyptian revolution on Egyptian society; David Hirst and Irene Beeson, Sadat (1981), is an early assessment of the Sadat years; Raymond A. Hinnebusch, Jr., Egyptian Politics Under Sadat: The Post-Populist Development of an Authoritarian-Modernizing State (1985), is an interesting study; Derek Hopwood, Egypt. Politics and Society, 1945–1984, 2nd ed. (1985), is a general comprehensive introduction; and P.J. Vatikiotis, The History of Egypt, 3rd ed. (1985), together with Afaf Lufti al-Sayyid Marsot, A Short History of Modern Egypt (1985), are especially valuable for their analyses of the post-Sadat period.
Laila Shukry El Hamamsy
Marsden Jones
Charles Gordon Smith
Derek Hopwood
John R. Baines
Alan K. Bowman
D.S. Richards
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