The Arab Conquest of Egypt Available from http://CopticChurch.net © Oxford University Press 1978 Map I. The Delta to illustrate the Conquest. Page iii The Arab Conquest of Egypt And the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion By Alfred J. Butler D. Litt., F.S.A. Containing also The Treaty of Misr in Tabari (1913) and Babylon of Egypt (1914) Edited by P.M. Fraser with a critical bibliography and additional documentation SECOND EDITION Page iv Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paolo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press 1978 Special edition for Sandpiper Books Ltd., 1998 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Within the UK, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0-19-821678-5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd., Midsomer Norton Page v Introduction to the Revised Edition A.J. BUTLER'S The Arab Conquest of Egypt, published in 1902, went out of print in 1945, and has been in steady demand since that time as the most comprehensive and authoritative treatment of its subject. The decision to republish it with some additional matter is therefore fully justified. The conquest of Egypt was but one event in the Arab Conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, and it was not in isolation, but as part of the general history of the reign of Heraclius on the one hand, and, on the other, of the great wave of Muslim conquest that Butler treated it. This gives his work its outstanding value, and that value is heightened by the lively style and robust learning with which it is informed. Butler brought to his task of writing the history of the Conquest the background of a Classical scholar whom residence in Egypt as tutor to the Prince Tewfik in 1880-I (to which his reminiscences, Court Life in Egypt (1887), bear entertaining witness) had provided with familiarity both with the antiquities of Christian and Muslim Egypt — documented in his early work, The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt (1884, reprinted by the Clarendon Press, 1970) — and with Arabic sources. The Arab Conquest, the historical link between the two aspects of Egyptian history that most interested Butler, had not iously been the subject of a full critical work, and, Page vi as Butler said in his Preface, his work `needed no apology'. The Conquest was indeed in need of critical treatment, and this Butler provided with admirable acumen, establishing for the first time, within a wide framework, the true value of the non-Greek sources both for the Conquest and for the preceding Sassanian conquest of the Middle East, and of Heraclius' triumphant but short-lived reconquest. Of these events, no less than of the Conquest, Butler gave a highly individual and independent account, in which he showed himself at once a master of the critical use of sources and of historical writing. The high praise accorded to his treatment of the subject by Ignaz Goldziher in his review in the Byzantinische Zeitschrift is in itself a lasting guarantee of its worth. Nevertheless, our knowledge of the reign of Heraclius, and in particular of his wars with Persia, of the Conquest itself, and, above all, of the nature of early Muslim rule in Egypt, has altered considerably in the last two generations, and a critical reader turning to Butler's narrative today may reasonably expect some guidance as to more recent work in these fields. This I have attempted to provide in the Additional Bibliography (see pp. xliii-lxxxi), which covers in some detail works relating to Egypt in the seventh century A.D. In particular, I have tried to provide fairly full lists of Greek and Arabic papyri of the reign of Heraclius and of the early years of Muslim rule respectively, and also of the very relevant, but slightly later, correspondence of the Ummayad governor of Egypt, Qurrah b. Sharik, with the pagarch Basilius of Page vii Aphrodito. In general, the reader is referred to these bibliographies, where he will also find some indication of the major points at issue. In this context one point of general significance in an estimate of Butler's work may be made. Though conversant with the relevant Arabic sources, Butler, as he himself admitted (see p. iv), was in no sense a specialist in Arabic literature and, more particularly, in the vast field of Arabic historiography. It is the burden of the criticism made against Butler by Leone Caetani, Prince of Teano, in his monumental Annali dell'Islam (see the bibliography to chs. xiv-xxii, below, p. lxvi) that he had not given due weight to the traditional element, the hadith, reaching back in a chain of authorities, the so-called isnad, to eye-witnesses of particular historical events, by virtue of which the Traditions recorded by later writers have value only in so far as their source provides it, and must therefore be judged as statements of tradition, frequently of a tendentious nature, and not of an independent inquiry. This criticism, which was also made by K. Vollers in his review of Butler's work in the Historische Zeitschrift, must stand — and Butler himself tacitly accepted it, for in his later work, The Treaty of Misr in Tabari, Clarendon Press, 1913 (reprinted here), he carefully sets out his material in the form of the isnad — but since the Arab historians play in any case but a secondary role compared with the narrative of John of Nikiou and some of the Patriarchal and Monastic Coptic and Arabic texts, the defect does not seriously vitiate the narrative. Butler's own major departures from the fable convenue of the Conquest — his Page viii estimate of the decisive role of Cyrus in facilitating the Conquest, and his defence of the Copts against the charge of betraying Egypt to the Arabs on sectarian and political grounds — derive essentially from his interpretation of John and of Severus Ibn Moqaffa`'s History of the Patriarchs. I have already mentioned the growth of documentary evidence from Egypt, relating both to the reign of Heraclius and also to the first half-century of Muslim rule, culminating in the richly documented governorship of Qurrah b. Sharik. Butler could have no knowledge of most of this material, Greek or Arabic, and consequently his picture of Muslim administration is theoretical rather than actual; based, that is to say, on the accounts of the principles of Muslim administration in the conquered territories recorded by the Arab historians and jurists, and not on the contemporary documents which alone indicate the extent of the debt of Muslim to Byzantine in this field. (For an earlier epoch we might compare the picture of the economic regime of Ptolemaic Egypt given by Félix Robiou in his Mémoire sur l'économie politique, l'administration et la législation de l'Égypte au temps des Lagides in 1876 with that given by Professor Claire Préaux in her L'Économie royale des Lagides in 1939.) The years between 1900 and 1939 saw the publication of a hitherto undreamed-of quantity of documentary material from Egypt — Greek, Arabic, and Coptic — on a scale that is not likely to be repeated — and the present time is not unsuitable for taking stock in this respect. Butler himself returned to some central issues of the Arab Conquest in two pamphlets which he Page ix published on the eve of the First World War, and which have become excessively rare: The Treaty of Misr in Tabari (Clarendon Press, 1913) and Babylon of Egypt (ibid. 1914). In justice to Butler, but at the possible loss of a certain unity of treatment, these two pamphlets are republished after the main text of this edition, with their original pagination and indexes. In addition to publishing these two pamphlets, Butler's own hand-copy of The Arab Conquest contains a large number of additions, corrections, and observations in the light of reviews, subsequently published material, etc., expressly for inclusion in a second edition. Quite apart from considerations of the cost involved in resetting so much material, the incorporation of these scholia into the text would have created major difficulties, since many of them are inconclusive notes of the type any author makes in his hand-copy, and others have themselves been overtaken by still later material; with a few exceptions the additions appear mostly to be earlier than 1918. It may, however, be worth while to indicate the main items, publication of which provoked the major marginalia (often of considerable length); they are (except (v)) included in the Additional Bibliography below, in the relevant place, and the major reviews are noted below, p.