Chapter VIII: The City of the Arabian Nights

IN the preceding chapter we finished the story of Cairo as the capital of an independent state, and described some of the beautiful buildings with which the Mamlúk Sultans and nobles adorned the city. But the life of a town does not consist in the doings of the court, and we should form a very incomplete picture of mediæval Cairo if we looked no deeper than the Sultans and their mosques and colleges and tombs. Though trampled under the hoofs of the dominant troopers, the city had a vigorous life of its own, a life of prosperous commerce, of social enjoyment, and of literary culture. Cairo society was no longer the limited palace coterie cooped up within the high walls of the Fátimid palaces. It spread on all sides save the east. It had flowed out beyond the northern gates, and formed the new suburb of the Hoseyníya, where many mosques and chapels grew up. It had spread to the west over the space between the old Fátimid wall and the Nile, and the river had conveniently receded and allowed the new port of Bulák and a whole colony of houses to be formed on what had been the Nile bed till the wreck of the good ship _Elephant_ helped to make a sand bank, called the Elephant’s Isle (Gezírat-el-Fil), which altered the river’s course and provided an excellent building site. To the south the space between the Fátimid walls and the Citadel and the mosque of Ibn-Tulún, where only gardens and summer villas and pools flooded at high Nile had been seen in Saladin’s day, was now covered with houses, among which rose the domes and minarets of the mamlúks.

The expansion of the city may readily be traced in the Topographer’s careful record of the building of mosques, which necessarily implies a neighbouring population. The mosque of Yúnus (c. A.H. 719) and of Ibn- et-Tabbákh (“the son of [Násir’s] cook,” 746), in the quarter of el-Luk, point to the recession of the Nile which formerly ran close by. In the same way the foundation of the mosques of Ibn-Gházy (741) and et-Tawáshy (745) on the outside (or west) of the old Bab-el-Bahr, and the Záwiya of Abu-s-Su‘úd (c. 724) outside the Bab-el-Kantara, point to a westward extension, though here the land was not formerly under water. The great expansion to the north, caused by the upheaval of the Elephant’s Isle, before 1200 A.D., and the emergence of Bulák a century later, may be fully traced in the annals of the mosques. Makrízy tells us that the Elephant’s Isle was flooded only at high Nile, and during the rest of the year it was a links of sandbanks and coarse grass, where the mamlúks used to practise archery, in their unhappy ignorance of golf. But as the Nile receded “people began in 1313 to erect houses, in consequence of the improvements made in that part by en-Násir,” who had dug the new canal then known as the Khalíg en-Násiry and now as the Isma‘ilíya, which drained the tract; “and a proclamation was made in Káhira and Misr inviting every one to build there without delay. So the emírs and soldiers and merchants and common folk built houses there, and Bulák was created at this period.”[76] He adds that water was drawn from the Nile by a sákiya wheel which stood on the spot where the mosque of el-Khatíry was afterwards built, which shows that the river has not retreated much since, for it still runs very near this mosque, which was founded by Aydemir in 737 on a site which was under water thirty years before. Other mosques at Bulák were those of Ibn-Sárim and el-Básity (817).

Behind or east of Bulák, on what is now called the ‘Abbasíya road, was a plot of land beside the Elephant’s Isle, known as Ard-et-Tabbála or the “demesne of the tamburina,” because it was presented by the caliph Mustansir to a singing girl who celebrated the glories of the Fátimids to the accompaniment of her drum. There also houses began to be built, and the mosque of el-Keymakhty was founded there, on the New Canal, in A.H. 790. Before this another mosque, that of el-Asyúty, had been erected about 740 on the Elephant’s Isle, as well as that of Sarúga on the New Canal near the Pool of er-Ratly. Still further to the east we find a number of mosques rising in the new quarters outside the old city walls. Such were the gámi‘s of Almelik (732) and Ibn-el-Felek in the Hoseyníya quarter, those of Akúsh and Ibn-el-Maghraby on the canal outside; the convents of Yúnus, Algibugha (c. 750) and Ibn-Ghuráb (798), and the Záwiyas of el-Ga‘bary (c. 687), Nasr (c. 719), el-Kalendaríya (c. 722), and el-Khiláty (c. 737), outside the Bab-en-Nasr, all of which testify to the expansion of the city towards the north.

Cairo had in fact attained much the same dimensions as it measured fifty years ago, before the new European suburbs near the Nile were developed. There was probably little difference either in outward aspect or in the life of the middle and lower classes between the Cairo of the fifteenth century and the city which Europeans such as Wilkinson, Burckhardt, Lane, John Phillip, and Hay visited and described or painted in the first half of the nineteenth. Some of Hay’s and his companion’s, O. B. Carter’s, drawings, sketched about 1830, are here reproduced, and they may fairly be taken as true representations of a town which still retained its essential mediæval characteristics.

How different Cairo must then have appeared to the newly arrived visitor, who landed at Bulák after coming through the Mahmudíya Canal from Alexandria and then ascending the Nile. There was a mile’s ride from the river bank at Bulák to the Bab-el-Hadíd by which you entered Cairo at the north-west corner, and instead of the crowded villa suburb of to-day, there was scarcely a house to be seen. “Two principal roads,” writes Lane,[77] “of nearly the same length lead from Bulák to Cairo; the northern, which is somewhat irregular, but is the chief route of commerce [there were of course no railways then], leads to the Bab-el- Hadíd; and the southern, after having crossed two canals, enters the western side of the Ezbekíya. We pass the picturesque mosque of Abu-l-‘Ola on our right as we enter the latter road. The French, during their occupation of Egypt, raised this road, intending also to continue it through the town as far as the Citadel. It is straight and wide, but very uneven, and wanting a row of trees on its southern side to shade it. It is raised a few feet above the level of the plain, so as to be above the reach of the inundation. On either side during the inundation are marshes and inundated fields. These, as soon as the waters have subsided, are sown with corn, beans, trefoil, etc. Here and there are clusters of palm trees, and a few sycamores and acacias. The plain was formerly bounded on the east by extensive mounds of rubbish [doubtless the ruins of Maks], behind which the capital was nearly concealed. The road crosses two canals, over each of which is a stone bridge. . . . Along the western side of the second canal, on the right of the road, is a long ridge of rubbish. From the top of this ridge, about a quarter of a mile from the gate of the Ezbekíya, we obtain a view of Cairo.”

This was how one approached Cairo in the first half of the nineteenth century. The description reads drearily enough, but it has the merit of showing what the place was like before the European builder took it in hand. When the traveller plodded along the uneven road between the bean- fields in 1835 he was traversing precisely the same scene as had been trodden by the mamlúk horsemen for centuries, and he was approaching a city which was still to all intents the city of the Arabian Nights. There is no manner of doubt, from internal evidence, that it was in Cairo that these famous tales took their definite shape. Their origins have of course been traced to a large extent in Persia and India, but their final form and colour are Egyptian. Though many of the scenes are laid at Baghdád, where the famous Harún er-Rashíd played so conspicuous and erratic a part, it is obvious to any student of the topography that the writers were very imperfectly acquainted with the caliph’s city. It is Cairo that they know and describe, whatever names they please to give to their scenes. There are incidental touches that make it probable that the Arabian Nights assumed their present form, in all essentials, before the middle of the fourteenth century. The latest historical personage mentioned is Saladin, and there are many reasons for believing that the tales were collected and written very nearly in their final shape during the revival of letters that ennobled the golden age of mamlúk civilization on the Nile. The society they describe is precisely what we know of mamlúk times: it is orthodox Muslim society of the Cairene type.

It may be wondered that there should be any speculation at all about the date of so famous a book; but the explanation is simple. Scholars and learned men in the East have always looked with contempt upon stories such as these, which are wholly devoid of the literary preciosity which was the special pride of the true man of letters. Hence they did not deign even to mention the Thousand and One Nights, save in two or three slight references which do not determine the date of the existing redaction. The Nights were written for the people, for the audiences who gathered in the coffee-shops to listen to the professional reciter, for the large uneducated middle class of Cairo. This is what constitutes their special merit in the eyes of the student of mediæval Egypt. The doings of kings and emírs we learn from the detailed pages of Makrízy and many other scholarly writers: it is from the Thousand and One Nights that we gain our insight into the life of the people—a life divided from that of the great by a gulf over which the Oriental historian rarely leaps. The tales are above all the adventures of merchants and shop- keepers. We are introduced no doubt to caliphs and sultans and vezírs, as well as to the ginn, ’efrits and márids and other members of the spirit-world; but the real actors in the stories are traders, men who keep shop and who have ventures upon the seas, and often make voyages themselves. Sindibad might easily have heard many of his own adventures from the lips of the motley crowd that gathered on the quays at Misr from all parts of the known world. Ibn-Sa‘íd stood and watched the shipping in 1246 and noticed vessels arriving from all lands: “as for the merchandise from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea that comes to Misr it is past describing; here is it bonded, not at Cairo, and hence it is distributed throughout Egypt.” What was true of Misr and Maks was also true of their successor, the fourteenth century port at Bulák. It was from Bulák that ‘Aly of Cairo, after spending all his inheritance making merry with his wife on the island of Roda, took ship for Damietta and set forth on his quest of a new fortune. The constantly recurring references to commercial voyages and great profits are exactly what would occur to a people whose wealth was made not only by a prodigiously fertile soil, but by a copious foreign trade.

What the transit trade of Egypt was worth in mamlúk times may be judged from a few facts. A single vessel clearing cargo at Alexandria paid £21,000 in customs. The great Italian republics found it necessary to maintain consular agents in Egypt, and that there was a wealthy colony of European merchants is shown by their being able, headed by the consul of Venice, to guarantee the king of Cyprus’s ransom of £100,000. The Venetians had enjoyed special privileges in Egypt since the time of el-‘Adil, in 1208, who allowed them to build a mart (funduk) of their own at Alexandria; the Pisans had a consul there; and the concessions to Venice were renewed in 1238. On the other side, in the Red Sea, there were the ports of Suez, Tor, Koseyr, ‘Aydháb, Dehlek and Sawákin, where the mamlúk sultans levied customs of a tenth _ad valorem_. The Indian trade had greatly developed under the later mamlúk sultans, and there was much rivalry and a tariff war between the Arabian and Egyptian ports in the Red Sea in the effort to secure the heavy customs dues, which were pressed beyond the customary tenth. In 1426 we read of forty vessels from India and Persia paying £36,000 in duties at Gidda, the port of Mekka, which, like Yenbu‘, was then Egyptian. Nor were the government duties limited to importation. There were certain monopolies: sugar, pepper, wood, metalwork could be sold only at government warehouses, at government prices, subject to duty. A consignment of pepper that was bought at Cairo for fifty dinárs was sold to Europeans at Alexandria for one hundred and thirty under government regulations. The Venetians, after vain consular remonstrance, sent a fleet to Alexandria to bring away all their merchants, and Bars-Bey was obliged to reduce his exorbitant terms.

How much store the Circassian sultans set by the transit trade between India and Europe has been seen in the vigorous effort made by el-Ghúry to crush the Portuguese in the Arabian Sea as soon as he realized the dangerous rivalry of the Cape route. Indeed the transit trade must have been a chief source of wealth. As Mr Cameron, our consul at Port Sa‘íd, has well put it, the mamlúk sultans, “masters of both Egypt and Syria, held the ports and caravan routes between Europe and her Indian trade, and levied customs dues on every bale of Oriental produce which arrived from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea for transfer to the harbours between Alexandria and Alexandretta and for transhipment to Venice. Until the discovery of the Cape route in 1498, and its subsequent development, they enjoyed the monopoly of the entire volume of Indian trade with the Levant; and Venice, by her commercial capitulations with them, was their sole agent on the continent. Let us try and estimate what this monopoly meant. An Arab merchant like Sindbad the Sailor, . . . buys £10,000 worth of raw silks, nutmegs, pepper, indigo, cloves, and mace in Persia or at Calicut and lands them at Basra or Suez. The sea route up the Persian Gulf would be shorter than the voyage up the Red Sea; but the caravan road from Basra to Aleppo would be more perilous than the short journey across Egypt. At landing, the customs would amount to some £4000 [this is much above the mark], and the goods would then be worth, say, £20,000. A second Arab merchant on the Mediterranean coast [or perhaps at the wharves of Bulák] would sell the consignment for £30,000 to the Venetian, who would have to pay another £5000 customs dues before he could clear his cargo. Thus, whether in customs or in tolls, or in presents to local governors and escorts, a quarter of the £35,000 paid by the Venetian would go to the mamlúk sultan and aristocracy merely for the privilege of transit.”[78]

It was not the government alone that made the profit. The Cairo merchant who brought the precious bales from India and the Spice Islands, or at least bought them from the Indian traders at the Red Sea ports, made his fortune too. The Thousand and One Nights are full of such successful ventures. Did not the Second Sheykh, who led the Two Black Hounds, describe how “we then prepared merchandise and hired a ship and embarked our goods, and proceeded on our voyage for the space of a whole month, at the end of which we arrived at a city where we sold our merchandise, and for every piece of gold we gained ten”? Such fortunate speculations were no doubt of everyday occurrence, and the trade represented by these ventures did not all go out of the capital: a large part found its way into the bazars to be retailed to the good people of Cairo and to minister to the luxurious tastes of the thousands of hangers-on to the mamlúk court. We can form but a meagre notion of the mediæval _funduk_ from the present bazars. A _funduk_, or _khan_, or _wekála_—there is little difference between the three terms—is a great collection of warehouses and shops, generally surrounding a court, but sometimes more like a covered arcade, where the merchants keep their reserves of stores, and where traders find lodgings for themselves and stabling for their beasts between their journeys. One great mediæval khan is still familiar to every tourist—the Khan el-Khalíly or “Turkish bazar,” built by Garkas el-Khalíly, the Master of the Horse of Sultan Barkúk in 1400 on the site once occupied by the graves of the Fátimid caliphs, whose bones were dug up and carted away on asses to the rubbish-mounds outside the eastern Gate. Another khan, the Hamzáwy, or cloth market, is also well known; and two of Káit-Bey’s wekálas, the façades of which are finely ornamented with arabesque panels and intricate geometrical designs, and wooden medallions carved with the sultan’s name, still remain beside the Azhar and in the Surugíya. When Lane described Cairo in 1835 there were about two hundred wekálas, and even now one can scarcely pass down a street without finding one of these big courts surrounded by rooms—the inn of the east—opening out through a tall gateway.

In the fifteenth century the khans of Cairo were busy marts of the merchants; and the mamlúk emírs, who had clear ideas as to the value of house property, emulated one another in building handsome wekálas, every room of which might be expected to bring in a substantial rent. There was the khan of Mesrúr, one of the most famous. The young man in the Story of the Humpback “put up” there, and stored his merchandise, and after a night’s rest took some of his goods and went to the “kaysaríya of Garkas,” another famous market of mediæval Cairo dating from Fátimid days, to sell to the merchants. “Do as other merchants,” said the sheykh of the brokers to the stranger; “sell thy merchandise upon credit for a certain period, employing a scrivener, a witness, and a moneychanger, and receive a portion of the profits every Thursday and Monday: so shalt thou make of every piece of silver two—besides thou wilt have leisure to enjoy the amusements of Egypt and its Nile.” So the young man followed his advice and left his goods to be sold for him, whilst he lived joyously at the khan of Mesrúr, breakfasted on wine and chicken and mutton and sweetmeats, and perfumed himself elegantly, till he met the damsel at the shop of Bedr-ed-din, the gardener, and there happened what fate had decreed, to be a warning to such as would be admonished. That the young man should have his hand cut off by the executioner at the Gate of Zuweyla was exactly what might be expected in the days of the mamlúks. This khan of Mesrúr (or rather two khans, one large and the other small) was built on a part of the site of the Fátimid Great Palace where the slaves used to be sold, by Mesrúr, a favourite slave of Saladin, who left it as a legacy for the benefit of the poor. The larger building had a hundred rooms, and was the chief resort of merchants from Syria,—“the most renowned and greatest of the khans,” says the Topographer, but its prosperity declined after the tribulation of Syria at the hands of Tamerlane, “its honour departed and many of its apartments were ruined.”

Another famous khan was that of Bilál, a slave of es-Sálih, the grand- nephew of Saladin, so favoured that the sultan Kalaún used to say, “God have mercy on our late master es-Sálih! I used to carry the slippers of this eunuch Bilál whilst he went into the presence!” The slave was very rich and abounded in good deeds, many poets praised him and were amply rewarded, and among his worthy acts was the building of the khan, where the merchants would deposit their chests of great value. “I used to enter this funduk,” says Makrízy, “and lo! around it were chests piled, little and great, so that only a small space was left in the middle, and these chests contained gold and silver enough to amaze one.” Then there was the “Khan of the Sebíl,” outside the Bab-el-Futúh, founded by Saladin’s vezír, Karakúsh, for “sons of the road,” poor wayfarers, who were received without payment; and the Wekála Kusún, built by Násir’s son-in-law, near the mosque of el-Hákim, where Syrian merchants stored oil, and sesame, and soap, and preserves, and pistachio-nut, almonds, syrups, and the like, every store-room being let by the emír’s order at no more than five dirhems of silver, without extortion, and no one being turned away. It was a busy place in Makrízy’s time, very popular on account of its cheapness, full of people and bales of goods, and noisy with the shouts of the porters. There were 360 lodgings above the store- rooms, all occupied, and 4000 people lived there. The Tatar devastation of Syria ruined this khan too. Opposite the Zuweyla Gate stood the fruit-market where the produce of the gardens round Cairo was sold; it was roofed over, like most of the bazars in former days, to keep off the rays of the sun, and the fruit, which smelt like the gardens of Paradise, was tastefully arranged and decorated with flowers and sweet herbs.[79]

There were many more great buildings of this kind, the history of which is related by the laborious Topographer, whose descriptions enable us almost to reconstruct in imagination the city of the fifteenth century. Cairo was a sumptuous and beautiful place in those days. The old mamlúk palaces—of which we have but relics in the huge blank walls of Beshták’s palace, the fine gateway of Yeshbek’s _dar_ next to Sultan Hasan’s mosque, and the better preserved mansions of Káit-Bey and of the emír Mamáy (known as the Beyt-el-kady)—were then in their full glory. The various quarters were still separated by their strong gates barred at night. The súks were shaded by matting or wooden roofs, and the lattice- windows with their delicate tracery overhung the streets. Makrízy enumerates and describes 37 _Háras_ or quarters, 30 districts (_khutt_), 65 streets (_darb_), 21 by-streets and alleys (_zukák_ and _khawkha_), 49 squares or _places_ (_rahba_), 50 markets (_suk_), 23 great markets (_kaysaríya_), 11 hostelries (_khan, funduk, wekála_), 55 famous palaces and mansions (_kasr, dar_), 44 public baths (_hammám_), 28 closes and gardens (_hakar, bustán_), 11 racecourses (_meydán_), and numerous pleasure-houses or belvederes (_manzara_).

Many of the streets still run in their old places, and some of their names survive, such as the Salíba or cross-ways, Beyn-el-Kasreyn, Beyn- es-Sureyn, Harat Bargawán, Suk-es-Siláh, Khan-el-Khalíly, Darb-el-Asfar, Habbaníya, Khurunfísh. The old quarters of Cairo have changed much less than the old parts of London; but the reason is melancholy. London has changed because it has grown; Cairo remained comparatively unaltered because it was slowly decaying. The loss of much of the Indian trade, the dependence upon Turkey, the misrule of pashas and mamlúk beys, all tended to reduce the prosperity of the city which had flourished exceedingly under the Turkish and Circassian sultans.

With decline of trade came decline in the arts. There is still a little good work made in Cairo in brass chasing, jewellery, and silk weaving, but it is a poor relic of what once went on there. One has only to visit the Arab Museum to realize what magnificent work the artists of Cairo produced in the mamlúk period. The arts were closely related to the mosques, which attained their greatest perfection of ornament in the same period, and the chief objects in the museum were once parts of the decoration or furniture of the mosques. The beautiful inlaid and chased silver and brass tables, with delicate designs in open tracery, Koran cases, lamps and chandeliers, bowls, censers, candlesticks, enamelled glass lamps with inscriptions in blue picked out with carmine and gold, generally came from mosques and centre round the fourteenth century. The carved panels inlaid with ivory and ebony and choice woods once enriched the doors and pulpits of the mosques, and the cast bronze bosses and cut brass filigree work belong chiefly to the same period. There are many admirable examples of these arts in the South Kensington Museum, and the British Museum possesses an unsurpassed collection of Saracenic metal work. There is unhappily no “Market of the Inlayers” now at Cairo, as there was in Makrízy’s time. This silver and gold inlay of arabesques and inscriptions on a brass base was one of the most elaborate and characteristic of Saracenic arts. It was not Egyptian in origin, but derived from the old Sasanian silversmiths of Mesopotamia. The oldest specimens we know came from Mosil on the Tigris, which was a famous home of metal-workers, within reach of the mines of the Taurus country. No doubt these Mosil smiths were attracted to Cairo in the flourishing days of the mamlúk sultans, or even earlier. At least it is certain that some of their finest work was done for the Egyptian market, and even bears the names of well-known Cairene rulers and emírs. There is the casket, for example, engraved with the name and titles of el-‘Adil II, Saladin’s grand-nephew, who sat on the throne of Egypt from 1238 to 1240, and was succeeded by es-Sálih, the husband of “Spray of Pearls.” It is in the Mosil style of the earliest period; the sides are ornamented with dotted eight-foils (exactly resembling the ornament on the silver coins of the family of Saladin) containing hunting scenes, a combat with a lion, a horseman with falcon on wrist (which is covered with the falconer’s glove), etc.; the intervening ground is decorated with fine arabesques, and an inscription on the bevel of the lid gives the name and titles of the sultan. On the top are personifications of the six planets (of Arabian science) surrounding the sun (the seventh):—the Moon, a seated figure holding a crescent; Mercury, with his writing materials; Venus, a woman playing on the lyre; Mars, a warrior brandishing a sword and holding a bleeding head; Jupiter, a throned judge; and Saturn, patron of thieves, with his bludgeon and purse. Outside these is a band of the twelve signs of the Zodiac, represented much in the usual manner. On the bottom of the box is an inscription stating that it was made “for the royal wardrobe of el-‘Adil.”

The hunting-scenes and representations of human figures and animals are characteristic of Mesopotamian silver work, and we see medallions of two-headed eagles on a splendid inlaid perfume-burner in the British Museum, “made,” as the silver letters inform us, “by order of his excellency, the generous, the exalted lord, the great emír, the honourable master, marshal, warrior for the faith, warden of Islám, mighty, heaven-supported, victorious, Full Moon of the Faith Beysary, mamlúk of ez-Záhir (Beybars),” etc. The date must be before 1279, and the vessel carries us back to the days of Kalaún and the beginning of mamlúk splendour. Beysary was one of the greatest and most sumptuous of the early mamlúk emírs, and his perfume burner was typical of the luxurious refinements of his palace. He valued his comfort more than ambition, and twice refused the precarious honour of the throne during the unsettled period succeeding Kalaún’s death, when the sultanate was open to the strongest emír. Even so he could not escape the consequences of being wealthy and distinguished, and in spite of his retiring character he was suspected of pretensions to power, fleeced of his treasures, and often confined to the dungeons of the Citadel. His palace, which stood in Beyn-el-Kasreyn, covered four acres, and possessed the richest mosaics and the handsomest carved doors in Cairo. Bedr-ed-din Beysary was indeed the most sumptuous man of his time. He loved to surround himself with beautiful things, and his slave body- guard was the best appointed of the day. No fortune could support his lavish extravagance. He not only spent upon himself, but gave prodigally to all who asked him. Hospitality was his foible, and his gifts to the poor ran in round sums of five hundred or a thousand dirhems (say francs) to each applicant. He would daily distribute three thousand pounds of meat, and a single present consisted of a thousand pieces of gold, five thousand bushels of corn, and a thousand hundredweight of honey. One of his mamlúks used every day to draw ninety pounds of meat and seventy rations of barley, which it is to be presumed neither he nor his horses could possibly digest. Naturally Beysary was perpetually in debt. The constant amount of his liabilities is placed at 400,000 dirhems, for as soon as one debt was paid off, the generous soul hastened to contract another of the same figure. A considerable part of his expenditure must have gone in table equipage, for it is recorded that he never drank twice out of the same cup; and as Makrízy mentions that at one time this thirteenth century epicure was wholly given over to wine and hazard, the number of cups required must have been considerable. But a great and cultivated emír needed more than cups for his comfort: he must have inlaid tables on which to put the broad brass tray incrusted with chased silver and gold, which carried his service of the forbidden fruit of the grape; he must have his beautiful hall lighted by candles placed in elaborate stands, covered with silver inlay; his very tubs and cooking-pots must be chased with arabesques and complicated designs, and his palace must be perfumed with incense rising from perfume-burners on which the artist had engraved representations of horsemen at the chase, hounds and quarry, falcons and waterfowl, and all the decorative subjects of the Saracen silversmith.

The earliest and finest examples of metal work connected with the names of Cairo kings and nobles are of Mosil origin, though very probably made in Cairo in the “Market of the Inlayers” by artists who had been attracted to the court. There was undoubtedly an early Fátimid art of a similar character, but beyond a very few rare examples, such as the Bayeux casket at Paris and some specimens of cut crystal at Venice, we know almost nothing of its style. Under the mamlúk sultans, however, Cairo soon acquired a school of her own, which seems to have possessed traditions coming from a different source than that of Mosil. The Cairo style is what we see on the numerous trays, bowls, cups, censers, and other vessels of the mamlúks of Egypt of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, preserved in our museums and private collections. Some points of resemblance to the Mosil work may be noticed, but the new elements are very distinct. The figures of horsemen and seated princes have for the most part disappeared, as it was natural they should when the Turkish princes became habituated to the puritanical prescriptions of Islám concerning the treatment of living things in art; but borders representing beasts of the chase, and a ground covered with wild duck and other fowl, still remain. The prevalence of the duck, which was easily explicable in the swamps of Mesopotamia, finds another _raison d’être_ in Egypt, for the founder of the line of sultans who ruled in Cairo for nearly a century was a Turk of Kipchak, whose name, Kalaún, means in his native Mongol tongue “duck.” We may compare Abbot Islip’s plastic puns on his own name in his chapel in Westminster Abbey. The ornament of the mamlúk metalwork is essentially different in style from that of Mosil. The inscriptions are arranged in broad bands, with large surfaces of silver inlay, divided by medallions filled with the sultan’s name on a fess, or else by some heraldic coat of arms borne by the owner, among which the cup and polo-stick (indicating the court offices of cup-bearer and polo-master), the lozenge, and a curious imitation of a hieroglyphic inscription common on the ancient monuments of Egypt, but doubtless unintelligible to the copyists, are the most usual. Round the medallions are belts of flowers and leaves, reminding one of the designs of Damascus tiles; and similar leaves and flowers, interspersed with birds, cover the ground. The execution is no less admirable than the design. There was no scamped work among these Saracen smiths. They cut away the whole design in the brass, and undercut the edges to hold the thin plates of silver or gold, to be hammered and burnished in, which formed the design; and they chased with the graver every plate of silver, were it only a pin’s head in size, with wings or eyes or floral scrolls—a work of infinite labour; and then they covered the interstices, where the brass showed, with a black bituminous composition which set off the precious metal to advantage. Much of the silver and coating has been lost by wear and time, and it is difficult to realize the beauty of the original state of most of the vessels and trays that have come down to us; but a careful examination only reveals more fully the exquisite skill, care, and fine honest workmanship that no time or injury can destroy.

This art of silver inlay, like architecture and wood and ivory carving and every other variety of æsthetic expression, culminated in the wonderful efflorescence of art and culture in the reign of en-Násir, Kalaún’s son, in the first half of the fourteenth century. Whenever in any museum we see a fine specimen of metalwork, we may be almost sure to find the name of a Násiry emír—that is a courtier or mamlúk of en- Násir—in its inscription, and sometimes even the name of the sultan himself.

The Topographer tells us that in his day, in the early part of the fifteenth century, this beautiful art had fallen into disrepute. It used, he says, to be a favourite taste, and “we have seen inlaid work (_keft_) in such quantities that it could not be counted; there was hardly a house in Cairo or Misr that had not many pieces of inlaid copper,”—he means brass. A stand of inlaid bowls and plates ranged on a frame of carved wood and ivory was a usual part of a bride’s trousseau, and cost as much as two hundred dinárs. But, he adds, “the art is now lacking in Misr; . . . the demand for this inlaid copper-work has fallen off in our times, and since many years the people have turned away from buying what was to be sold of it, so that but a small remnant of the workers of inlay subsists in this market.”[80]

The art was not dead, however; it had merely passed on elsewhere. The heritage which Cairo received from Mosil was bequeathed to Venice. We have seen that the Venetians were the European agents of the Egyptian merchants, and it is not too much to say that Venice was half an oriental city. Italy was full of Eastern influences. We know that a twelfth century poet lamented that Pisa was “delivered over to Moors, Indians and Turks”; that there was a via Sarracena at Ferrara, and Lucera was deeply tinged with Muslim traditions, dating from Frederick II’s importation of Saracen archers. But Venice felt this influence most of all. Her commerce and colonies brought her merchants into relations with the artistic work of the East; her ambassadors brought home the splendid gifts of the mamlúk sultans; and she soon began to import the artists as well as the art. The _opus Salomonis_ or Jews’ work was the name given to this Saracenic style, often referred to in early romances. Chaucer had heard of it, for he writes in Sir Thopas:—

“And over that a fyn hawberk

Was all i-wrought of jewes work.”

Especially did Venice excel in the chasing of great salvers in the Saracenic manner, though with considerable differences both in design and in technique. The silver is applied chiefly in narrow threads instead of broad plates, and the designs are chiefly arabesque, whilst the forms of the vessels show marked improvement upon the somewhat crude outlines of the Cairo silversmith. Native Italian artists began to copy the art introduced by Mahmúd the Kurd and his Saracen comrades. They called themselves Azzimine, _i.e._ workers in the Persian style _all’ Agemina_—for it has long been the fashion to miscall every form of Saracenic art Persian—and we read of Italian artists, such as Giorgio Ghisi Azzimina of Mantua, and Paulus Ageminius, who excelled in the art which had been imported from Egypt.

We have singled out the silver-inlay from among the arts of mediæval Cairo because it is a branch in which the development can be traced with certainty by a series of dated examples. But the chief decorative arts of the mosque builders were wood-carving and marble mosaic. The beautiful panelled work of mosque pulpits and doors, originally suggested, no doubt, by the necessity of small surfaces in a hot climate where warping had to be prevented, are among the most characteristic forms of Cairo ornament; and the use of variegated marbles in the mihrábs of the mosques produces a rich (if sometimes rather glaring) effect, which was imitated in the dados of the houses of the nobles, now unhappily for the most part destroyed. The extensive use of wood in Cairo architecture is the more remarkable when it is considered how little suitable wood grows in Egypt. On the other hand the dry climate, though it warps, preserves timber for centuries. The original wooden ties of the pillars of Ibn-Tulún’s mosque have stood for more than a thousand years and are still sound, and a portion even of the ceiling of the arcades has been preserved. This wooden ceiling shows that in the ninth century the same method was used as is seen in all periods of Saracenic art previous to the introduction of European styles. It consists of joists of palm trunks sawn in two, with the three exposed sides faced with planks to square the outline. The hollows between the squared joists were divided by cross pieces into shallow compartments or “coffers.” In private houses the joists were often left uncovered in their natural half-round shape. Whether planked or left in the round, the joists and the coffers between were coated with plaster, generally laid on canvas, and the plaster was painted with arabesques in deep blue, carmine, and gold. These coffered ceilings, which may still be seen in many houses, have a wonderfully rich effect with their deep tones of red and blue, lighted up by gold outlines; and the transition from the ceiling to the walls is skilfully masked by arching and stalactite pendentives, richly painted with similar designs. Inferior to the coffered ceilings, but still very effective, are those composed of boards nailed flat across the joists and covered with a thin coating of stucco, worked into arabesque and floral patterns, and then painted and gilt; or with a geometrical design formed by appliqué strips of wood, gilt shaded with red, the interstices being filled with arabesques in painted stucco.

Wood-carving had ample opportunities for display in the pulpits, Korán desks, interior doors and cupboards of mosques. Some of the oldest examples, from the mosques of Ibn-Tulún and el-Hákim, may be seen in the Arab Museum at Cairo, and the deep volutes carved in the panels are clearly of Byzantine origin, resembling the still earlier but undated panels found in the tract of ‘Ayn-es-Síra, south of Cairo. In the thirteenth century the style alters. Instead of the bold foliate designs we find more intricate and delicate ornament distributed in much smaller geometrical panels. A peculiarly beautiful example is the Sheykh’s tomb- casing of 1216, of which one side is in the Museum at South Kensington, and the other three in the Arab Museum. Another is the carved casing of the tomb of es-Sálih Ayyúb (1249):—“the little panels are formed into hexagonal stars and delicately carved, and here appears the representation of fruit-stalks, which is a common feature in thirteenth century wood-carving. The mihráb or prayer niche from the chapel of Seyyida Rukeyya, which belongs probably to the same century, deserves special notice for its characteristic ornamentation of stems branching out of a vase.”[81] But it was under the Mamlúk Sultans, and especially in the great period of en-Násir that wood-carving attained its most exquisite development. Woods of different colours were employed to produce the effect of relief, and inlay was largely adopted in place of carving in the solid block. Sometimes each little carved panel was set in a frame of ebony beading, which was itself carved, and often consisted of two or three distinct frames, one outside the other; whilst the central design was hardly ever the same in two panels out of many hundreds. The amount of careful work demanded in carving and putting together a large surface of this intricate panelling must have been immense. Many beautiful examples may be seen in the mosques, and even finer are the carved doors in wood and ivory panelling in the Coptic churches of Babylon, from which there can be little doubt that the Muslims learnt the art; but to see Mamlúk carving at its best one need not leave London. A large number of the very finest specimens were taken away from their lawful guardians during the reign of the Khedive Isma‘íl, and even earlier, and have found their way to the Museum at South Kensington. There we may study at leisure some of the rich yet not over-elaborate arabesque carvings abstracted from the pulpit set up in the mosque of Ibn-Tulún by Lagín in 1296; others of extraordinary beauty from the mosque of el-Maridány, 1339, absurdly set in the top of a French table; others, probably from the pulpit of the mosque of Kusún, also set in coarse modern framework, but preserving all the delicate grace of the arabesque carvings absolutely intact; and finally the complete pulpit bearing the inscription of Káit-Bey, but from what mosque is not known. The whole forms a singularly rich and beautiful exhibition of Saracenic wood-carving of the best period.[82]

There are differences and even decadence in the series, however, and a careful study of the designs will show that the art reached its highest point in the carvings of el-Maridány, _i.e._ immediately after the reign of en-Násir. Sheykhú’s pulpit of 1358 is not so good; Sultan Hasan’s is of stone; el-Muáyyad’s of 1420 is distinctly inferior; and even Káit- Bey’s, prince though he was of Cairo builders, is not to be compared with the work of the middle of the fourteenth century. The designs have become less spontaneous, the lines are harder and more mechanical, and (as in stone carving) there is a tendency to repetition utterly foreign to the earlier work. Part of this may be explained by the introduction of ivory as the material for the inlaid panels, for ivory, though capable of even more delicate carving, is less easy to work in flowing lines. But the main cause was probably the preponderating attention given to carving in stone. No sooner does stone become the predominant material for decoration than wood-carving, like stucco-tooling, falls into comparative neglect. The middle of the fourteenth century was the parting of the ways. Stone became the favourite material, and the carvers of wood, if they did not lay aside the graver for the stone- chisel, at least moulded their style upon the harder outlines of the sculptors, and the result was deterioration.

If wood-carving decayed after the middle of the fourteenth century, another branch of woodwork was notably developed. One charming feature of the exterior of a Cairo house is the _meshrebíya_ of delicate turned tracery. There is no reason to doubt that this kind of work is very old, but whether by reason of its fragility or the frequent conflagrations that afflicted the city, no ancient examples have been preserved. The few wooden lattices that still remain in the older mosques are of quite a different style: they are made of stout clumsy quarterings, divided into compartments filled by square or round upright balusters, such as are seen in the tomb of Kalaún. Others are mere grilles of large open squares, with no pretension to artistic design. A finer kind is seen in Lagín’s pulpit in the mosque of Ibn-Tulún (1296), where the mesh is close and the knobs are inlaid and carved. It is curious that the true meshrebíya, with its varied designs and lace-like effect, first appears in the screen of the sanctuary in the mosque of el-Maridány, which also shows the highest development of wood-carving. As the one art decayed, the other improved. There are fine examples of meshrebíya work of the early part of the fifteenth century, as in the pulpit of el-Muáyyad, but it attained its greatest perfection in the age of Káit-Bey, of which a fine specimen is preserved in the pulpit of Abu-Bekr ibn Muzhir. Most of the house meshrebíyas are comparatively modern, though it is impossible to fix their precise date. Their inevitable disappearance is an æsthetic loss that nothing can replace; but it must be admitted that they formed the most dangerous conductors of fire from house to house and street to street that the ingenuity of man could well devise.

There is this to be said about every branch of artistic work of mediæval Cairo, whether it be architecture, carving in wood or stone, metal chasing, or glass—it is always distinctively original. The Saracens brought no art with them; indeed they appear to have been singularly lacking in the æsthetic sense. They learned their arts from their foreign subjects, yet they invariably introduced an element of differentiation which marks their work as characteristically Saracenic. They learned their metal chasing from Persia, but they soon made it their own; they copied Byzantine and Coptic wood-carving, and added the essential personal equation which constitutes a distinct art; they found glass making and blowing in Egypt, acquired the secrets of enamelling and gilding from Constantinople, and then produced a style of enamelled lamps totally unlike any other in the world. It is not only a variation in design or shape that makes the difference: the whole character of the work, in every branch of Saracenic art, is distinct and absolutely _sui generis_. They were not only wonderful assimilators, they also had the genius of development on original lines. Perhaps the strangest part of the matter is that the highest development was achieved in the troubled times of singularly uncultivated and sanguinary foreign masters. Yet the age of the Mamlúk Sultans was the Saturnian age of Mohammedan Egypt in art and also in literature. For it must not be forgotten that some of the greatest names in Muslim theology, jurisprudence, criticism, and history were associated as kádis or professors with the mosques and medresas of Cairo, and that the mamlúk period produced or encouraged such writers as Ibn-Khaldún, Nuweyry, Ibn-Dukmák, Makrízy, Ibn-Hagar, el-‘Ayny, Ibn-‘Arab-shah, Abu-l-Mahásin, es-Suyúty, and Ibn-Iyás, who either were born in Egypt, or, like Abu-l-Fida, spent many years in Cairo. The fifteenth century was perhaps the most prolific period in Egyptian literature, and this activity was more than rivalled in the neighbouring province of Syria under the same sultans.