A.H. 19–20.
Soil left with the cultivators.Az-Zubeir urged ʿAmr to enforce the right of conquest, and divide the land among his followers. ʿAmr refused; and the Caliph confirmed the judgment. "Leave it,' was his wise reply, "in the people's hands, to nurse and fructify." ʿAmr himself was refused ground whereon to build a mansion for himself. He had a dwelling-place, the Caliph reminded him, at Medīna, and that should suffice. So the land of Egypt, left in the hands of its ancestral occupants, became a rich granary for Arabia, just as in bygone times it had been the granary of the Roman empire.
Suez Canal. Reopened, 21 A.H. 642 A.D.A memorable work, set on foot by ʿAmr after his return to Fusṭāṭ, facilitated the transport of corn from Egypt to the Ḥijāz. It was nothing less than the reopening of the ancient communication between the waters of the Nile in Upper Egypt and those of the Red Sea at Suez.[1] The channel left the eastern branch of the river at Bilbeis, then turned to the right, and, striking the salt lakes near Timsāḥ, reached the Red Sea by what is now the lower portion of the Suez Canal. Long disused, the bed was choked with silt; but the obstructions could not have been very formidable, for within a year navigation was restored, and the Caliph, at Yenboʿ (the port of Medīna), witnessed vessels discharge their burdens which had been freighted under the very shadow of the Pyramids. The canal remained navigable for some eighty years, when, choked with sand, it was again abandoned.
Nothing could show how well disposed ʿAmr was towards the native Egyptians better than the fact that, as soon as the Greek dominions had been overthrown, he caused search
- ↑ A canal connecting the Nile near Bubastis with Lake Timsāḥ already existed under Rameses II. (Herod, ii., p. 158). Pharaoh Necho attempted to continue this canal southwards to the Red Sea. The design was completed by Darius a century later. A second canal was made by the Ptolemies at Tell Fāḳūs, nearer to the Mediterranean. This took the line of lagoons (the modern fresh-water canal) to the Red Sea, and was too shallow to be of much use, excepting in high flood. One of these lines eventually (deepened, apparently, by Trajan, since it is called Amnis Trajanus) remained navigable to the end of the third century of our era, It was the same canal, no doubt, which was now cleared out and deepened by ʿAmr.
head and black eyes, and a good-humoured expression." The tradition adds a sermon given by ʿAmr in this Mosque, which, of course, like much else that we read about this campaign, is mere fiction.
