These are not the latest Egyptian monuments in the Sudan, nor are the temples of Naga and Mesawwarat the most ancient, though they belong to the Roman period and are decidedly barbarian as to their style and, especially, as to their decoration. The southernmost as well as latest relic of Egypt in the Sudan is the Christian church of Soba, on the Blue Mie, a few miles above Khartum. In it was found a stone ram, an emblem of Amen-Râ, which had formerly stood in the temple of Naga and had been brought to Soba perhaps under the impression that it was the Christian Lamb. It was removed to the garden of the governor-general’s palace at Khartum, where it now stands.
The church at Soba is a relic of the Christian kingdom of Alua, which succeeded the realm of the Candaces. One of its chief seats was at Dongola, and all Nubia is covered with the ruins of its churches. It was, of course, an offshoot of the Christianity of Egypt, but a late one, since Isis was still worshipped at Philse in the sixth century, long after the Edict of Theodosius had officially abolished paganism throughout the Roman world, and the Nubians were at first zealous votaries of the goddess of Philo. So also when Egypt fell beneath the sway of the Moslem in the seventh century, Nubia remained an independent Christian state, and continued so down to the twelfth century, when the soldiers of Islam conquered the country.
Of late pagan and early Christian Egypt very much that is new has been discovered during the last few years. The period of the Lower Empire has yielded much to the explorers of Oxyrrhynchus, and many papyri of interest belonging to this period have been published by Mr. Kenyon in his Catalogue of the Greek Papyri in the British Museum, especially the letters of Flavius Abinæus, a military officer of the fourth century. The papyri of this period are full of the high-flown titles and affected phraseology which was so beloved of Byzantine scribes. “Glorious Dukes of the Thebaïd,” “most magnificent counts and lieutenants,” “all-praiseworthy secretaries,” and the like strut across the pages of the letters and documents which begin “In the name of Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, the God and Saviour of us all, in the year x of the reign of the most divine and praised, great, and beneficent Lord Flavius Heraclius (or other) the eternal Augustus and Auto-krator, month x, year x of the In diction.” It is an extraordinary period, this of the sixth and seventh centuries, which we have now entered, with its bizarre combination of the official titulary of the divine and eternal Cæsars Imperatores Augusti with the initial invocation of Christ and the Trinity. It is the transition from the ancient to the modern world, and as such has an interest all its own.
In Egypt the struggle between the adherents of Chalcedon, the “Melkites” or Imperialists of the orthodox Greek rite, and the Eutychians or Mono-physites, the followers of the patriarch Dioskoros, who rejected Chalcedon, was going on with unabated fury, and was hardly stopped even by the invasion of the pagan Persians. The last effort of the party of Constantinople to stamp out the Monophysite heresy was made when Cyril was patriarch and governor of Egypt. According to an ingenious theory put forward by Mr. Butler, in his Arab Conquest of Egypt, it is Cyril the patriarch who was the mysterious Mukaukas, the [Greek word], or “Great and Magnificent One,” who played so doubtful a part in the epoch-making events of the Arab conquest by Amr in A.D. 639-41. Usually this Mukaukas has been regarded as a “noble Copt,” and the Copts have generally been credited with having assisted the Islamites against the power of Constantinople. This was a very natural and probable conclusion, but Mr. Butler will have it that the Copts resisted the Arabs valiantly, and that the treacherous Mukaukas was none other than the Constantinopolitan patriarch himself.
In the papyri it is interesting to note the gradual increase of Arab names after the conquest, more especially in those of the Archduke Rainer ‘s collection from the Fayyûm, which was so near the new capital city, Fustât. In Upper Egypt the change was not noticeable for a long time, and in the great collection of Coptic ostraka (inscriptions on slips of limestone and sherds of pottery, used as a substitute for paper or parchment), found in the ruins of the Coptic monastery established, on the temple site of Dêr el-Bahari, we find no Arab names. These documents, part of which have been published by Mr. W. E. Crum for the Egypt Exploration Fund, while another part will shortly be issued for the trustees of the British Museum by Mr. Hall, date to the seventh and eighth centuries. Their contents resemble those of the earlier papyri from Oxyrrhynchus, though they are not of so varied a nature and are generally written by persons of less intelligence, i.e. the monks and peasants of the monasteries and villages of Tjême, or Western Thebes. During the late excavation of the XIth Dynasty temple of Dêr el-Bahari, more of these ostraka were found, which will be published for the Egypt Exploration Fund by Messrs. Naville and Hall. Of actual buildings of the Coptic period the most important excavations have been those of the French School of Cairo at Bâwît, north of Asyût. This work, which was carried on by M. Jean Clédat, has resulted in the discovery of very important frescoes and funerary inscriptions, belonging to the monastery of a famous martyr, St. Apollo. With these new discoveries of Christian Egypt our work reaches its fitting close. The frontier which divides the ancient from the modern world has almost been crossed. We look back from the monastery of Bâwît down a long vista of new discoveries until, four thousand years before, we see again the Great Heads coming to the Tomb of Den, Narmer inspecting the bodies of the dead Northerners, and, far away in Babylonia, Narâm-Sin crossing the mountains of the East to conquer Elam, or leading his allies against the prince of Sinai.
THE END.