Within the Arab community, there were more settled and prosperous tribes, reaching out into the more intractable desert, marginal desert dwell- ers—forerunners of the modern bedouin. Along the western line of Arabia from the Roman frontier south toward Mecca, the Ghassanid family had the power, monopolizing all dealing with the Romans. They so prospered that other Arabs thought of them as Romans. The Lakhmids were the first family of the frontier between the Persians and Arabia and played a similar role, reaching to the city of Hira almost within sight of the Euphrates, near where Syria and Iraq come together today. If you were a Roman used to cities and government, you thought of these Arabs as dubious folk, and when you chose to honor al-Harith, the prince of the Ghassanids, and tried to use him as your cat’s-paw in controlling the lands beyond the borders, you knew you were taking a risk. Eventually you would find him and his son, al-Mundhir, too inclined to go their own way and you would call them traitors.
If you were bedouin of the desert, however, you saw the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids as people who knew how to navigate the world of empires and armies and how to maintain their strength and identity. They were good protectors, partners, and employers—a source of stability North and east of Palestine the businessman-traveler.
Cosmas’s Alexandria was the mother city of Egypt. An ancient and un¬broken line of civilization—of agriculture, of urban life, and of temples— continued into the sixth century. In cities and among elites, Greek all but supplanted the native language (Coptic), and Greek-branded Christianity had made broad inroads. Coptic (its name derived from the name of the land, “Aegyptos”) appeared first in written texts in the fifth century CE, by then fully Christianized itself. The survival of Coptic from that day until now has gone hand in hand with the survival of Christianity under many forms of Islamic rule.
Christian temple busters
Christian temple busters had been effective enough, particularly in Alexandria (Cairo would not become powerful until the Islamic period), but from the Nile delta south a line of pyramids great and small served as reminders of a very old past, standing watch on the ridge where the cultivated land of the valley, watered by the Nile’s annual floods, gave way to the desert upland. One fourth- or fifth-century Egyptian, Horapollon, wrote plays, commentaries on the ancient poets, and a work on temples. Then he (or possibly a son or grandson of the same name) wrote an extensive book explaining the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphic language and its religious symbolism. He occasionally got things right, but only occasionally. Horapollon’s father, Asclepiades, had traveled widely, writing, apparently, a synoptic treatise on all the religious ideas of the Greek world. He had lingered particularly at Heliopolis (Baalbek), studying its faceless idols, remnants of an ancient Semitic religion. His brother, Heraiscus, was said to have a more practical religious talent: the ability to tell at a glance which sacred statues were actually inhabited by divine spirits. He would sniff them and then either walk away or fall, on the spot, into a religious trance in the presence of the divine.
