Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 1, 2025
At this period the population of Egypt was, like the towns that covered it, a mixture of the wrecks of several nations, Kopts, the survivors of the ancient inhabitants of the land; Arabs, who conquered Egypt from the Kopts; and Turks, the conquerors of the Arabs.
Koptic is still studied for church purposes by the Kopts, who both by their physiognomy and by their retention of the old Egyptian institution of monasticism are the only true descendants having the social and physical heredity of the ancient Egyptians. Four of the oldest monasteries in the world still survive in the Natron Valley.
The Delta was peopled by three races of men, Kopts, Greeks, and Phoenicians, or Arabs; and even before the sceptre was given to the Greeks by Alexander's conquests, we have seen that the Kopts had lost the virtues needed to hold it. We know of few princes who ever mounted a throne with such fair prospects before them as the second Ptolemy.
These Egyptian troops were chiefly Arab settlers in the Thebaid, for the Kopts had long since lost the use of arms. The Kopts were weak enough to be trampled on; but the Arabs were worth bribing by admission into the legions.
They were to court the sheikhs, to win the Kopts, and to establish the levy of the taxes in order to supply the wants of the army. Bonaparte was also attentive to keep up the relations with the neighbouring countries, in order to uphold and to appropriate to himself the rich commerce of Egypt.
The native Egyptians, both Kopts and Arabs, now rise into more notice, as the Greek civilisation sinks around them. And soon the upper classes among the Kopts, to avoid the duty of maintaining a family of children in such troubled times, rush by thousands into monasteries and convents, and further lessen the population by their religious vows of celibacy.
It is true that many of these advantages were forced in the hotbed of royal patronage; that the navy was built in the harbours of Phoenicia and Asia Minor; and that the men of letters who then drew upon themselves the eyes of the world were only Greek settlers, whose writings could have done little to raise the character of the native Kopts.
On the arrival of the French, the Kopts amounted at most to two hundred thousand: poor, despised, brutalised, they had devoted themselves, like all the proscribed classes, to the most ignoble occupations. The Arabs formed almost the entire mass of the population.
During the three hundred years before Alexander was hailed by Egypt as its deliverer, scarcely once had the Kopts, trusting to their own courage, stood up in arms against either Persians or Greeks; and the country was only then con-quered without a battle because the power and arms were already in the hands of the Greeks; because in the mixed races of the Delta the Greeks were so far the strongest, though not the most numerous, that a Greek kingdom rose there with the same ease, and for the same reasons, that an Arab kingdom rose in the same place nine centuries later.
It is notable that the burning of these tombs took place before their re-use in the eighteenth dynasty; as is also seen by the re-built doorway of the tomb of Den, which is of large black bricks over smaller red burnt bricks. It is therefore quite beside the mark to attribute this burning to the Kopts. Afterwards it was despoiled by the Kopts in erasing the worship of Osiris.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking