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 Fayyum, which was so near the new capital city, Fustat.  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 Der 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 Tjeme, or Western Thebes.  During the late excavation of the XIth Dynasty temple of Der 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 Bawit, north of Asyut.  This work, which was carried on by M. Jean Cledat, 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 Bawit 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, Naram-Sin crossing the mountains of the East to conquer Elam, or leading his allies against the prince of Sinai.