Ebook The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion

For this book, so far as its purpose is concerned, perhaps no apology is needed. It aims at con structing a history, at once broad and detailed, of the Saracen conquest of Egypt. No such history has yet been written, although scattered essays on the subject may be found from Gibbon onwards brief sketches or chapters in some wider treatise upon the Roman or the Arab empire. Indeed the fact that no serious and minute study upon the conquest exists in any language is not a little remarkable: but it has been mainly due to two causes — the scantiness of the material accessible to ordinary students, and the total want of agreement among the authorities, familiar or unfamiliar, eastern or western.