Note 379 — Chapter XXIV · CONQUEST OF EGYPT. A.H. XX. A.D. 641.

The circumstances of the siege (a strange contrast to the bombardment, which recently crowded the horrors of months into so many hours) are narrated with the utmost brevity; and indeed tradition very much confuses the second siege with the first. Eutychius speaks of the investment of the city by the Arabs lasting fourteen months. He also tells us that George the Patriarch fled to Constantinople, and that for ninety-seven years there was no Melchite patriarch for Egypt. A Maronite patriarch seems to have succeeded.

I should mention that by later and less reliable authorities a long correspondence is given as having passed between Amru and Omar, in which the latter upbraids his lieutenant for not remitting ‘as large a revenue as that which Egypt yielded to the Pharaohs.’ Amru resented the imputation; whereupon Omar sent his legate, Mohammed ibn Maslama, to set on foot an investigation into the revenues of the country; and also superseded Amru in the government of Upper Egypt by Abdallah Ibn Abu Sarh. The correspondence (though accepted by Weil) appears to me altogether apocryphal. It was contrary to Omar’s character to write in the harsh and unreasonable tone of these letters, or to press his governors for funds at the expense of the provinces which they administered. Nor did he stand in any urgent need of the additional revenue, as these letters would imply; for the treasures of the world were flowing at this time in a full tide into Medîna. As to Ibn Abu Sarh, he did not supersede Amru till the reign of his foster-brother Othmân.