Copies of the Bible were also made in Alexandria for sale in western Europe; and all our oldest manuscripts show their origin by the Egyptian form of spelling in some of the words.  The Beza manuscript at Cambridge, and the Clermont manuscript at Paris, which have Greek on one side of the page and Latin on the other, were written in Alexandria.  The Latin is that more ancient version which was in use before the time of Jerome, and which he corrected, to form what is now called the Latin Vulgate.  This old version was made by changing each Greek word into its corresponding Latin word, with very little regard to the different characters of the two languages.  It was no doubt made by an Alexandrian Greek, who had a very slight knowledge of Latin.

Already the papyrus on which books were written was, for the most part, a manufactured article and might claim the name of paper.  In the time of Pliny in the first century the sheets had been made in the old way; the slips of the plant laid one across the other had been held together by their own sticky sap without the help of glue.  In the reign of Aurelian, in the third century, if not earlier, glue had been largely used in the manufacture; and it is probable that at this time, in the fifth century, the manufactured article almost deserved the name of paper.  But this manufactured papyrus was much weaker and less lasting than that made after the old and more simple fashion.  No books written upon it remain to us.  At a later period, the stronger fibre of flax was used in the manufacture, but the date of this improvement is also unknown, because at first the paper so made, like that made from the papyrus fibre, was also too weak to last.  It was doubtless an Alexandrian improvement.  Flax was an Egyptian plant; paper-making was an Egyptian trade; and Theophilus, a Roman writer on manufactures, when speaking of paper made from flax, clearly points to its Alexandrian origin, by giving it the name of Greek parchment.  Between the papyrus of the third century, and the strong paper of the eleventh century, no books remain to us but those written on parchment.

The monks of Mount Sinai suffered much during these reigns of weakness from the marauding attacks of the Arabs.  These men had no strong monastery; but hundreds of them lived apart in single cells in the side of the mountains round the valley of Feiran, at the foot of Mount Serbal, and they had nothing to protect them but their poverty.  They were not protected by Egypt, and they made treaties with the neighbouring Arabs, like an independent republic, of which the town of Feiran was the capital.  The Arabs, from the Jordan to the Red Sea, made robbery the employment of their lives, and they added much to the voluntary sufferings of the monks.

[Illustration:  267.jpg THE PAPYRUS PLANT]