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The duties of patriarch of Alexandria were then performed by Michel, commonly called Khail by the Kopts. This patriarch was of the Jacobite sect and the forty-fifth successor of St. Mark: he held the office about three years.
But while we are watching the success of Ptolemy's plans, and the rise of this Greek monarchy at Alexandria, we cannot help being pained with the thought that the Kopts of Upper Egypt are forgotten, and asking whether it would not have been still better to have raised Thebes to the place which it once held, and to have recalled the days of Ramses, instead of trying what might seem the hopeless task of planting Greek arts in Africa.
The third and last race was that of the Turks; but it was not more numerous than the Kopts, amounting to about two hundred thousand souls at most, and was divided into Turks and Mamluks.
The most important matter was to restrain the depredations of the Bedouins, and, to assure the obedience of these hitherto unsubdued tribes, he kept their sheikhs as hostages: at the same time he checked the delinquencies of the Kopts, in whose hands the government of the territories had been from time immemorial.
In these royal tombs there had been not only the plundering of the precious metals and the larger valuables by the wreckers of early ages; there was after that the systematic destruction of monuments by the vile fanaticism of the Kopts, which crushed everything beautiful and everything noble that mere greed had spared; and worst of all, for history, came the active search in the last four years for everything that could have a value in the eyes of purchasers, or be sold for profit regardless of its source; a search in which whatever was not removed was deliberately and avowedly destroyed in order to enhance the intended profits of European speculators.
The beautiful temples of Dendera and Latopolis, which were raised by the untiring industry of ages and finished, under the Roman emperors, were begun about this reign. Though some of the temples of Lower Egypt had fallen into decay; and though the throne was then tottering to its fall, the priests in Upper Egypt were still building for immortality. The religion of the Kopts was still flourishing.
He now named as his heir to the caliphate Walid, his eldest son, and replaced Abd el-Aziz in the government of Egypt with his second son, Abd Allah ibn Abd el-Malik. The Kopts hoped to obtain from the new governor the repeal of the act that exacted yearly tribute from the clergy, but Abd Allah did not think it fair to grant this unjust discrimination against the poorer classes of the Egyptians.
The personal tax, which was the only one, had been determined in a fixed manner by the treaty of submission he had concluded with the Kopts; and an unimportant ground rent on landed property was added in favour of the holy towns of Mecca and Medina, as well as to defray some expenses of local administration.
During the reigns of the Ptolemies, the sculpture, the style of building, the religion, the writing, and the language of the Kopts in the Thebaid were nearly the same as when their own kings were reigning in Thebes, with even fewer changes than usually creep in through time.
If Thebes had fallen only on the conquest by Cambyses, if the rebellions against the Persians had been those of Kopts throwing off their chains and struggling for freedom, we might have hoped to have seen Egypt, on the fall of Darius, again rise under kings of the blood and language of the people; and we should have thought the gilded and half-hid chains of the Ptolemies were little better than the heavy yoke of the Persians.
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