For over 200 years (till 868) Egypt was a mere province of this huge caliphate, and was governed, like other provinces, with a sole view to revenue.  “Milk till the udder be dry and let blood to the last drop” was a caliph’s instructions to a governor of Egypt.  As these governors were constantly changed—­there were sixty-seven in 118 years under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad—­and as a governor’s main object was to “make hay while the sun shines,” the process of milking the Egyptian cow was often accelerated by illegal extortion, and the governor’s harvest was reaped before it was due.  Illegality was, however, checked to some extent by the generally wise and just influence of the chief justice, or kadi, whose probity often formed the best feature of the Arab government in Egypt.

Nor did the caliphs extort taxes without giving something in return.  The development of irrigation works was always a main consideration with the early Mohammedan rules, from Spain to India, and in Egypt, where irrigation is the country’s very life, it was specially cared for, with a corresponding increase in the yield.  Moreover, the governors usually held to the agreement that the Christians should have liberty of conscience, and protected them from the Moslem soldiery.  As time went on, this toleration abated, partly because the Moslems had gradually become the predominant population.  At the beginning the caliphs had taken anxious precautions against the colonising of Egypt; they held it by an army, but they were insistent that the army should not take root, but be always free to join the caliph’s standard.  But it was inevitable that the Arabs should settle in so fertile and pleasant a land.  Each governor brought a small army as his escort, and these Arab troops naturally intermarried with Egyptian women, who were constitutionally inclined to such alliances.  A few Arab tribes also settled in Egypt.

This gradual and undesigned Arabising of the country would lead to oppression of the Christians, to the “squeezing” of wealthy natives, and occasionally to the institution of humiliating distinctions of dress and other vexations, and even to the spoiling of Coptic churches.  Then sometimes the Copts, as the Egyptian Christians are called, would rebel.  Their last and greatest rebellion, which occurred in the Delta in 830-832, was ruthlessly trampled out by Turkish troops under Mamun, the only Abbasid caliph who made a visit to Egypt.  Many Copts now apostatised, and from this time dates the predominance of the Moslem population and the settling of Arabs in the villages and on the land, instead of as heretofore only in the two or three large towns.