their pursuers. At Chereum, about twenty miles from the end of their journey, the two armies fought a pitched battle, when the Greeks were again routed and fled to Alexandria, having in about three weeks made good their retreat of one hundred and fifty miles in the face of a conquering army.

(47) The garrison of Alexandria, now joined by the garrisons of Babylon and Memphis, strengthened the fortifications, and got ready for a brave defence, while the Mahomedans prepared for a regular siege. The Greeks made daily sallies from the gates, which the Mahomedans as bravely repulsed; and on one occasion the Arabs followed so closely upon the heels of the retreating Greeks that the foremost of them entered the city with the fugitives, and when the gates closed Amrou the son of Asi found himself a prisoner with a handful of brave followers. "Now that you are wholly in our power," said the patrician of Alexandria, when they were brought before him, "what would you that we should do with you?" The haughty Mahomedan, speaking as conqueror rather than as a prisoner, replied, "You must either pay us a tribute, or embrace our religion, or one of us must die," and from his lofty bearing the Greeks began to guess his rank. But Amrou was saved by the presence of mind of one of his followers, who, slapping his general rudely on the face, ordered him to hold his peace before his betters; and he then persuaded the patrician to make use of them as messengers to carry proposals for a truce to the besiegers. The prisoners were accordingly sent away by the patrician with letters to Amrou, and when they reached the Mahomedan camp in safety and the air rung with the joyous cries of "God is great," the Greeks at last found out their mistake, that they had had their greatest enemy in their power, and had released him to their own destruction.

(48) The next assault was fatal to the besieged. The Mahomedans again entered the city, but in greater numbers; the garrison fled, some to their ships and some along the shore ; and after a siege of fourteen months the Mahomedans were masters of Alexandria. Amrou then hastily and incautiously marched in pursuit of those who had quitted the city by land; when the ships, which had scarcely got out of the harbour, relanded the troops, and the Greeks again gained possession of the city and put to death the few Arabs

22 Decemb.

that were left to guard it. But Amrou as hastily returned Eutychii from the pursuit of the fugitives, a second time Annales. stormed the walls after a severe struggle, and a second time drove the Greek garrison to their ships. (49) Thus, on a Friday, the first day of the month of Moharra, being the new-year's day of the twentieth A.D. 640. year of the Hegira, Egypt ceased to be a Greek, or as it was still called, a Roman province. Amrou wrote word to the Caliph Omar, boasting that he had taken a city which beggared all description, in which he found four thousand palaces, four thousand public baths, four hundred theatres, twelve thousand sellers of herbs; and, having a thievish eye for Jewish industry, he added that there were forty thousand Jews paying tribute. Such was the store of wheat which he sent on camels' backs to Medina that the Arabic historian declares, in his usual style of eastern poetry, that the first of an unbroken line of camels entered the holy city before the last camel had left Egypt.

(50) The Arabs may well have been startled at the beauty and wealth of their new conquest, which, notwithstanding the ruin brought on by its sieges and civil wars, was still crowded with wonders of art, the fruits of long civilisation. But to the mind of a Greek well stored with history Alexandria in its fall must have been viewed with

Strabo,

lib. xvii. a melancholy interest. To a traveller arriving by sea, the first object to strike his eye was the lighthouse on the low island of Pharos, that monument of the science and humanity of the first two Ptolemies, that has since been copied in every quarter of the habitable globe. Near it was the Heptastadium, a causeway of three quarters of a mile in length, that joined the island to the land, and divided the enclosed waters into two harbours. There were bridges over the passages which joined the two harbours; but the aqueduct which once brought fresh water to lib. xi. the island was in ruins. On landing and entering Achilles by the gate of the sun, the gate of the moon might be seen at the further side of the city, at the end of a straight street with a row of columns on each side. In this street stood the Sema, the mausoleum which held the body of Alexander, from whose death so many Greek cities and empires dated their rise, and of which Alexandria was the

J. Malala,

Tatius, v.

Descript. de

last to fall. A second street, crossing the former at the Tetrapylon, ran east and west from the Canobic gate to the gate of the Necropolis, and had also once been ornamented with columns through its whole length, till half of it had been ruined by the fortifications and sieges of the Bruchium. The new Museum, which had been built to replace that of the Ptolemies, had been very much deserted since the fall of paganism, its schools and spacious halls were empty; but in vain the traveller would seek for the humble building which once held the famed catechetical school of the Christians, and which contributed so largely to the desertion of its prouder neighbour. On the outside of the western gate was the Necropolis, whose memorials of the dead, both pagan and Christian, lined the road side and sea coast for two miles, and harmonized most truly with the faded glories of the city; while the Jews had a humble burial- l'Egypte. place of their own, beyond the eastern gate. Near the western gate also, but within the walls, stood the famed temple of Serapis, second to no building in the world but the Roman Capitol, a monument of the rise and fall of religions, once the very citadel of paganism, now the cathedral of a Christian patriarch. In the centre of it stood, and indeed still stands, the lofty column of Diocletian, with an equestrian statue on the top, raised to record the conquering emperor's humanity and the gratitude of the citizens. Second among the larger buildings was the Sebaste, or xxxvi. 14. Cæsar's temple, with two obelisks in front, which latter, having during the last two thousand years seen the downfall of the Egyptian superstition, and then been removed to Alexandria in honour of Greek polytheism, remained to ornament a Christian church. Among the other churches the chief were those of St. Mark, of St. Mary, of John the Baptist, of Theodosius, of Arcadius, and the temple of Bacchus. Along the sea shore to the east lay the ruined Hippodrome; and on the same side, where the canal from the Nile reached the city, were the fortified granaries, a little citadel by itself; and not far off were the old mounds that marked out what was once the camp of the legionaries, with here and there an idle column, brought in the time of Augustus for his proposed city of Nicopolis. The inhabitants were no longer numerous enough to use the whole space

Pliny, lib.

Eutychii

which the city, with its gardens, once covered. The Bruchium, with its fortifications, once a city of itself, Annales. was in ruins; and the Jews' quarter was nearly a desert, inhabited only by a despised few, from whom their persecutors wrung a tribute; the Jews bought of the Christians that leave to worship the God of their fathers which the Christians were thenceforth to buy of the Moslems.

(51) But great as was the ruin which had come upon Alexandria during the misrule of the Roman emperors, it Descript. de Was small to what afterwards befel it under the l'Egypte. Arabs. As the city shrunk in size the Arabs surrounded it with a new fortification of a smaller circuit,

which does not even include Diocletian's column; and the population has since that time again so much lessened, that the whole of the modern city now stands on the widened Heptastadium, the causeway that joins to the main land what was once the island of Pharos. When the traveller, in order to gain a better view of this celebrated spot, now climbs the hill on which the temple of Pan once stood, he sees the town wholly at a distance; and the only ancient monuments standing are Diocletian's column (see Fig. 140), and an obelisk which ornamented the temple of the Cæsars, now called Cleopatra's needle (see Fig. 141). At the same time the cultivated soil of the country, the fields which are watered either by the natural overflow of the river or by canals and pumps, is no more than thrce millions of acres, or less than one third of what it was in the time of its great kings.

Fig. 140.

Fig. 141.

(52) The fate of the Alexandrian library still requires our attention. The first great library of that name, collected by the Ptolemies and placed in the Museum, in the quarter of the city called the Bruchium, was burnt by the soldiers of

Julius Cæsar. The second, which was formed round the library from Pergamus presented to Cleopatra by Mark Antony, was placed in the temple of Serapis; and, though that temple was twice burnt or at least injured by fire, once in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and again in the reign of Commodus, the library was unhurt in the reign of Julian, when Ammianus was in Egypt; and it then amounted to seven hundred thousand volumes. But when the pagan worship was put down by Theodosius I., and the temple of Serapis was sacked by the Christians, the library was either dispersed or destroyed, and when Orosius was in Egypt, in the reign of Theodosius II., he saw the empty bookshelves. There were other large libraries in Alexandria, although we have no particular account of them. The Museum of the Bruchium was rebuilt, but again destroyed with that part of the city in the reign of Gallienus. The Sebaste or Cæsar's temple had a library. The Emperor Claudius built a second college, called the Claudian Museum, which no doubt had a library. As the public schools of pagan philosophy continued open until the reign of Justinian, as the astronomers continued to make their observations in Alexandria, and as the Christians wrote largely, though perhaps to little purpose, on controversial divinity, we can hardly believe that in a city so famed for its libraries the Museum should have been without one. The Arabic historian tells us that when Alexandria was conquered by Amrou he set his seal upon the public library, together with the other public property of the city. But John Philoponus begged that the books might be spared, as being of no use to the conquerors; and Amrou would have granted the request at once if he had not thought it necessary to ask leave of the caliph. He therefore wrote to Medina for orders, and the Caliph Omar answered him that, if the books in the Alexandrian library were the same as the Koran, they were useless, and if not the same they were worse than useless, and that in either case they were to be burnt. Amrou obeyed this order, and sent the books, most of which were of papyrus, to the public baths of the city, and the Arabic historian, in the poetic style of his nation, says that the baths were heated by them for the space of six months.

Abul

Pharag.

Dyn. ix.

Abdallatif,

cap. iv.