The Cambridge History of Egypt. I. Islamic Egypt, 640-1517 (review)

The Cambridge History of Egypt. I. Islamic Egypt, 640-1517. Edited by Carl F. Petry (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 645 pp. $120.00

Any medievalist interested in experiencing at firsthand what it is like to be a weak king could learn much from editing a volume such as this one. Academics are notorious for their willingness to assume commitments that they cannot meet, and in the absence of anything seriously resembling a carrot or a stick, an editor can do little to reward compliance or punish deviance. Small wonder that the reputation of collective works hovers slightly above that of collective farms.

Against this background, the good news is that the editor of this volume has delivered a work to which readers can turn with some confidence for the narrative backbone of Egyptian history from the Arab conquest in the seventh century to the Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth--though some of the authors are more skilled than others in the art of providing clear and accessible outlines. As is often the case in such volumes, the thematic coverage is patchier. Themes like the place of Christians in Muslim Egypt and the monetary history of the country receive a chapter apiece, and deserve it. Another chapter is devoted to historiography from the late twelfth to the early sixteenth century, but nothing comparable is offered for earlier centuries. No chapters are assigned to themes as fundamental as historical geography and the history of agriculture. Such, no doubt, are the scars of collective authorship.

The bad news relates not to the period covered in this volume but to the one that precedes it. The Cambridge History of Iran is commendable because, among other things, it covers the entire history of the country from remote antiquity. The Cambridge History of China, in some ways a model of the genre, shortchanges readers by beginning its coverage only in the third century b.c.--a deficiency recently made good by the publication of a separate Cambridge History of Ancient China (1999). With the Cambridge History of Egypt, the loss is far more serious: The first 3,000 years of Egyptian history have gone missing.

The present volume opens with a chapter by Robert Ritner about the history of Egypt in the first centuries of our era, which pays close attention to the erosion of the Pharaonic heritage under Roman imperial rule. This is an excellent chapter. It provides a well-constructed and historically insightful overview, and, at the same time, it succeeds in putting readers in touch with a variety of primary sources. Looking back as it does to the Egypt of the Pharaohs and Ptolemies, rather than forward to that of the Caliphs and Sultans, it would have fitted perfectly at the end of a volume (or maybe two) about the ancient history of the country. Anyone with a philological turn of mind will wonder whether this chapter is not a survival of a projected volume on the history of ancient Egypt that never appeared. We are fortunate that this one did.

Michael Cook
Princeton University

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