In 1883, 1896, and 1897 he was at Cairo officially employed by the British Government upon the Mohammedan antiquities, and published his treatise on “The Art of the Saracens in Egypt” in 1886, in which year he visited Stockholm, Helsingfors, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Constantinople to examine their Oriental collections.  He has written histories of the “Moors in Spain,” “Turkey,” “The Barbary Corsairs,” and “Mediaeval India,” which have run to many editions; and biographies of Saladin, Babar, Aurangzib; of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, and Sir Harry Parkes.  He has also published a miniature Koran in the “Golden Treasury” series, and written “Studies in a Mosque,” besides editing three volumes of Lane’s “Arabic Lexicon.”  For five years he held the post of Professor of Arabic at Trinity College, Dublin, of which he is Litt.D.  Mohammedan Egypt, his special subject, he has treated in several books on Cairo, the latest being “The Story of Cairo.”  But his most complete work on this subject is “The History of Egypt in the Middle Ages,” here epitomised by the author.

I.—­A Province of the Caliphate

Ever since the Arab conquest in 641 Egypt has been ruled by Mohammedans, and for more than half the time by men of Turkish race.  Though now and again a strong man has gathered all the reins of control into his own hands and been for a time a personal monarch, as a rule the government has been, till recent years, a military bureaucracy.

The people, of course, had no voice in the government.  The Egyptians have never been a self-governing race, and such a dream as constitutional democracy was never heard of until a few years ago.  By the Arab conquest in the seventh century the people merely changed masters.  They were probably not indisposed to welcome the Moslems as their deliverers from the tyranny of the Orthodox Church of the East Roman or Byzantine Empire, invincibly intolerant of the native monophysite heresy; and when the conquest was complete they found themselves, on the whole, better off than before.  They paid their taxes to officials with Arabic instead of Greek titles, but the taxes were lighter and the amount was strictly laid down by law.

The land-tax of about a pound per acre was not excessive on so fertile a soil, and the poll-tax on nonconformity, of the same amount, was a moderate price to pay for entire liberty of conscience and freedom in public worship guaranteed by solemn treaty.  The other taxes were comparatively insignificant, and the total revenue in the eighth century was about L7,000,000.  The surplus went to the caliph, the head of the vast Mohammedan empire, which then stretched from Seville to Samarkand, whose capital was first Damascus and afterwards Baghdad.