[Illustration:  338.jpg COIN OF MALIK]

Careful about all that related to the Egyptian revenues, Assama commanded the keeping up of the various Nilometers, which still served to regulate the assessment of the ground tax.  In the year 718 he learned that the Nilometer established at Helwan, a little below Fostat, had fallen in, and hastened to report the fact to the caliph.  By the orders of this prince the ruined Nilometer was abandoned, and a new one built at the meridional point of the island now called Rhodha, just between Fostat and Gizeh.

[Illustration:  339.jpg CITADEL OF CAIRO (FOSTAT).]

But of all the financial transactions of Assama, the one that vexed most the inhabitants of Egypt, and which brought down on him the most violent and implacable hatred, was the ordinance by which all ascending or descending the Nile were obliged to provide themselves with a passport bearing a tax.  This exorbitant claim was carried out with an abusive and arbitrary sternness.  A poor widow, the Oriental writers say, was travelling up the Nile with her son, having with her a correct passport, the payment of which had taken nearly all she possessed.  The young man, while stretched along the boat to drink of the river’s water, was seized by a crocodile and swallowed, together with the passport he carried in his breast.  The treasury officers insisted that the wretched widow should take a fresh one; and to obtain payment for it she sold all she had, even to the very clothes she wore.  Such intolerable exactions and excesses ended by thoroughly rousing the indignant Egyptians.  The malcontents assembled, and a general revolt would have been the result but for the news of the death of the Caliph Suleiman (717), which gave birth to the hope that justice might be obtained from his successor.

The next caliph was Omar II., a grandson of Merwan I., who had been nominated as his successor by Suleiman.  In his reign the Muhammedans were repulsed from Constantinople, and the political movement began which finally established the Abbasid dynasty at Baghdad.  Omar dying in the year 720, Yazid II., a son of Abd el-Malik, succeeded to the caliphate, and reigned for four years, history being for the most part silent as to the general condition of Egypt under these two caliphs.  It is recorded that in the year 720, one of Yazid’s brothers, by name Muhammed ibn Abd el-Malik, ruled over Egypt.  The Kopts complained of his rule, and declared that during the whole reign of Yazid ibn Abd el-Malik the Christians were persecuted, crosses overthrown, and churches destroyed.

[Illustration:  341.jpg A CROCODILE USED AS A TALISMAN]