them down; but some time later when he had begun the study of Coptic he found that they must have belonged to that language, and accordingly made many efforts through his converts to recover them. But it was then too late; the generation which had preserved the memory of a song that was no longer intelligible had already passed away.
Religion long kept the two races, Arab and Egyptian, apart, and when eventually the Christian fellaḥ in the neighbourhood of Cairo had become Mohammedan, the Mohammedan Arab had become a townsman with a townsman’s sense of superiority over the country bumpkin. Hence the humour of the Cairo folk-tales is directed against the fellaḥ because he is a fellaḥ ignorant of the ways of the city, and for no other reason. The Arab of Cairo, indeed, felt himself the inferior rather than the superior of the city Copt: the financial and civil administration of the state was practically in Coptic hands, and the skilled artizan was almost always a Copt, as he continued to be down to the time when I first knew Cairo, what we call “Arab” art being really the art of Christian Egypt. I know of no Cairene folk-tales which satirize the Copts as such; Cairene wit is directed against the fellaḥin, the Nubians, the Europeans, and more especially the Turks, but not against the Copts.
The Turk was hated on account of his rapacity, his cruelty, and above all, his stupidity. This is the feature which is chiefly prominent in the stories in which he figures. The sharp-witted Cairene revenged himself upon Turkish tyranny by caricaturing him and inventing stories at his expense. And the stupidity of the Turk is represented, not as the naïve stupidity of the ignorant fellaḥ, but as an innate and overwhelming stupidity which no amount of education would cure.
The folk-tales of Upper Egypt are of a different class altogether. There is nothing of the city in them, and
