240 Proceedinrja of the Royal Irish Academy. 



must conclude ttat tliis treaty was made belnnd tlieii- backs; that it 

 was a compact between the Copts and tbe Arabs without the 

 authority of -the Eoman ganison, though these had the option of 

 accepting the same tenns. Air. A. J. Butler, in his recent learned 

 work on Tti.e Arab Conquest of Egypt, labours under the estraordiaary 

 impression that this treaty is really the treaty of capitulation of the 

 Eoman garrison of Alexandria. His words* are : ' But the text of the 

 treaty is actually given by Tabari, who by a strange confusion calls 

 it the Treaty of 'A in Shams, instead of the Treaty of Alexandria.' 

 Mr. Butler unfortunately gives a very inaccurate translation, and 

 then appends the curious footnote : * This treaty is preserved by 

 Ibn Khaldun, who quotes it from Tabari ; but it does not seem to 

 occur in Tabari' s extant account of the conquest of Egypt; see 

 Zotenberg's edition, vol. iii. pp. 461 seq.' Mr. Butler's valuable 

 work is vitiated in many places by his references to the Persian 

 abridgment of Tabari, which not only does not contain a great deal of 

 the most important passages of the original Arabic work, but intro- 

 duces errors by compression, and even adds mere legends from Persian 

 tradition. As we have seen, the original Arabic text of the treaty 

 does occur in de Goeje's edition of Tabari ; but it is not there called 

 the Treaty of Ayn Shems, and it could not possibly refer to the 

 capitulation of Alexandria. According to the earliest, indeed the 

 almost contemporary Christian authority — though nnhappily we 

 possess it only at third hand, and in a distractingly dislocated order — 

 John of IfiMu's Chronicle, cited by Mr. Butler from a translation of 

 the Ethiopic version of the Arabic translation of the Coptic or Greek 

 original, the capitulation of Alexandria included an armistice of 



* Arab Conquest of Egypt. Oxford : at the Clarendon Press, 1902, p. 324. 



