Lane-Poole — Mohammadan Treaties with ChriHtiana. 25(5 



could not read any language but Arabic, it is easy to see how he 

 might pervert or misunderstand the sufficiently confused and obscure 

 narratives of the Arabic chroniclers. Whether the same argument 

 would apply to the Synaxaria depends upon their dates, on which we 

 have at present no infonoaation. 



If we had nothing but these Coptic and Ethiopic data to go upon, 

 the identification might perhaps be taken as proved. But when we 

 look at the long series of Arabic writers, not only those whose works 

 survive, but many who are cited by survivors, but whose original 

 . writings are lost, and when we fail to find the slightest hint that any 

 one of them suspected el-Mukawkis and Cyrus to be the same person, 

 I confess that their evidence, negative as it is, seems to me over- 

 whelming. How is it that not one of them says that el-Mukawkis 

 was a priest, much less an archbishop ? Why do they give him the 

 name of George son of Mina or son of Kiu'kub, if his real name was 

 Cyrus ? Why does Abu-Salih, who was a Christian, and wi'ote about 

 1200 A.D., state that Heraclius placed the government of Egypt 

 under ' George the son of Mina el-Mukawkis,' and also cite 'the book 

 of el- Janah ' for the fact that ' the bishop of the Eomans at Misr and 

 Alexandria was named Cyrus ' ? How is it that not a single historian 

 of Egypt, Muslim or Christian, has ever said in so many words 

 ' el-Mukawkis was a title or nickname given to the patriarch Cyrus ' ? 

 It is incredible that such an identity — surely a striking fact if true — 

 should have escaped them all. And against this solid wall of negative 

 evidence that no Muslim historian, no Christian histoiian, not even 

 the almost contemporary John of Nikiu, mentions this identity, arc we 

 to accept two jottings in two church office-books, the date of which 

 is not given, and a not very definite incidental statement of a tenth- 

 century Copt who did not know Coptic ? 



