flight, Benjamin the Jacobite patriarch. A.D. 625-661 Benjamin was encouraged by a voice which bade him expect, at the end of ten years, the aid of a foreign nation, marked like the Egyptians themselves with the ancient right of circumcision. The character of these deliverers and the nature of the deliverance will be hereafter explained; and I shall step over the interval of eleven centuries, to observe the present misery of the Jacobites of Egypt. The populous city of Cairo affords a residence, or rather a shelter, for their indigent patriarch and a remnant often bishops; forty monasteries have survived the inroads of the Arabs; and the progress of servitude and apostacy has reduced the Coptic nation to the despicable number of twenty-five or thirty thousand families:[1] a race of illiterate beggars, whose only consolation is derived from the superior wretchedness of the Greek patriarch and his diminutive congregation.[2]
VI. The Abyssinians and Nubians VI. The Coptic patriarch, a rebel to the Cæsars, or a slave to the caliphs, still gloried in the filial obedience of the kings of Nubia and Æthiopia. He repaid their homage by magnifying their greatness; and it was boldly asserted that they could bring into the field an hundred thousand horse, with an equal number of camels;[3] that their hand could pour or restrain the waters of the Nile;[4] and the peace and plenty of Egypt
151 This number is taken from the curious Recherches sur les Egyptiens et les
Chinois (tom. ii. p. 192, 193), and appears more probable than the 600,000
ancient, or 15,000 modern, Copts of Gemelli Carreri. Cyril Lucar, the Protestant
patriarch of Constantinople, laments that those heretics were ten times more
numerous than his orthodo.x Greeks, ingeniously applying the (
Greek characters)
of Homer (Iliad ii. 128), the most perfect expression of contempt
(Fabric. Lux Evangelii, 740).
152 The history of the Copts, their religion, manners, &c. may be found in the Abbé Renaudot's motley work, neither a translation nor an original; the Chronicon Orientale of Peter, a Jacobite; in the two versions of Abraham Ecchellensis, Paris, 1651; and John Simon Asseman, Venet. 1729. These annals descend no lower than the xiiith century. The more recent accounts must be searched for in the travellers into Egypt, and the Nouveaux Mémoires des Missions du Levant. In the last century, Joseph Abudacnus, a native of Cairo, published at Oxford, in thirty pages, a slight Historia Jacobitarum, 147, post 150. [For the ecclesiastical history of Egypt cp. "The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt attributed to Abū ◌̱Sāliẖ the Armenian," tr. by B. T. Evetts, ed. by A. J. Butler, 1895; E. Amélineau, Monuments pour servir à l'hist. de l'Egypte chrét. au ivᵉ, yᵉ, viᵉ, et viiᵉ siècles, 1895.]
153 About the year 737. See Renaudot, Hist. Patriarch. Alex. p. 221, 222; Elmacin, Hist. Saracen, p. 99.
154 Ludolph. Hist. Æthiopic. et Comment. l. i. c. 8; Renaudot, Hist. Patriarch. Alex. p. 480, &c. This opinion, introduced into Egypt and Europe by the artifice of the Copts, the pride of the Abyssinians, the fear and ignorance of the Turks and Arabs, has not even the semblance of truth. The rains of Æthiopia do not, in the increase of the Nile, consult the will of the monarch. If the river approaches at Napata within three days' journey of the Red Sea (see d'Anville's Maps), a canal that should divert its course would demand, and most probably surpass, the power of the Cæsars.