Chapter 4 is primarily devoted to the influence of rhetoric on historiography. Here, too, the struggle for truth remains at the center, albeit in a dialectical relationship to the fictional, which Gorgias, the first great theoretician of rhetoric, was already aware of. Since the most important representatives of this new historiographical approach, Ephorus and Theopompus, have only survived in fragments, the first focus is on Isocrates, who was considered their teacher. His handling of history can be analyzed surprisingly clearly, and he shows a closeness to the rational-critical method, not least in his striving for truth and the awareness of the difficulties of searching for it. After a closer interpretation of the above-mentioned historians in this sense, the chapter treats another new tendency of historiography in the Hellenistic epoch. In the so-called tragic historiography, the representation of history again approaches the poetic. The striving for truth is now directed towards the most vivid representation of the real event, as if the recipient had been present at it.

Chapter 3 studies the beginnings of Greek historiography against the background of the intentional history described in the first two chapters. This clearly shows the innovative character of the new genre. The decisive factor for this was the influence of the new philosophical thinking that had initially developed in Ionia. The emphasis on rational procedures and the search for true knowledge was in the foreground, coupled with the curiosity of the researcher. The numerous stories of the Greeks were critically questioned by intellectuals of this provenance (e.g., Xenophanes, Hecataeus). Herodotus also felt obliged to the new rational-philosophical method, but at the same time he integrated many of the traditional stories into his new type of historical work. The critical direction then culminates in Thucydides, who in his own way and with the logic of power connects the present and the past. He was only too aware that he had strayed very far from traditional views of the past, and he himself underscored it very clearly.

Muslim and Orientalist historians alike have long presented the Islamic conquests as having happened very quickly. They depict them as a rapid expansion in which the old and declining Byzantine and Sasanian empires could not offer serious resistance to the brand-new Muslim armies. However, if the conquests of the central lands (Syria, Iraq, and Egypt) were swift, it took the Muslim armies considerably longer to conquer North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Similarly, it took centuries before the Muslims dominated Christian Nubia. The definitive conquest of the kingdom of Makuria was not made until 675/1276 by the Mamluk sultan Baybars. Despite this prolonged process of establishing their dominance over the region, medieval Muslim historians were reluctant to spell out the fact that the Muslim armies took centuries to be victorious.

In his ‘concluding perspectives’, the author first emphasises the differences between current and ancient ways of dealing with history in view of modern notions of history and the science of history. But he also draws attention to the fact – and cites respective remarks by a renowned historian (Angelos Chaniotis) on the director of the film Alexander the Great, Oliver Stone – that even in our times the elements of the true and the fictitious can be fruitfully combined when it comes to the adequate representation of history. Intentional or not – what brings history to life and keeps it alive is narration.

In a passage charged with symbolism, the third/ninth-century Egyptian historian Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam (d. 257/871) records a vision of the city of Alexandria that was popular in his time. According to his unnamed source, “Alexandria was built in three-hundred years, was inhabited for three-hundred years and was destroyed (khuribat) in three-hundred years.”1 The definiteness or completeness captured in the symbolic use of the number 3 and its multiples as well as the passage’s clear birth–maturation–death scheme reveals that the story was meant to indicate that Alexandria’s history had come to an end.2 The significance of this somewhat striking vision remains unarticulated. However, its presence in historical, geographical, and religious literature from the East as well as the west of the Islamicate world, from the third/ninth through the early eleventh/sixteenth centuries, shows that it enjoyed widespread and enduring popularity.

This chapter provides a survey of the close of the Late Bronze Age and the rise of Iron Age towns, and delivers an updated synthesis of existing evidence and arguments for climatic shifts across the eastern Mediterranean from the twelfth to fourth centuries BCE. Kearns then undertakes an island-wide comparative analysis of ruralization and urbanization apparent in survey records by the mid-first millennium BCE. Focusing on legacy and recent survey data, the chapter argues for oscillations in sedentism across the island as communities experienced environmental changes and cultivated new weathering practices, and situates the re-emergence of social differentiation in the relationships between households and land and new spaces for public gathering at tombs and shrines.

The main subject of Chapter 2 is the motifs and the content of the Greeks’ myth-historical tales and songs. The Greeks’ past was very clearly structured: the main axis was the battle for Troy with the generations before and after. The more distant past led back to the origin of the world, gods, and men. On the other hand, the stories have led to the present day. Concepts of kinship, mediated by genealogies, played an essential role. This was connected with stories of migrations, colonisation, expulsions, and re-migrations. These narratives served as elements in order to structure the past, to constitute familiarity and difference, to explain relations of friendship or enmity, among the Greeks themselves and in relation to foreigners. We cannot see these stories of migration as evidence for older ‘historical’ events. But they reflect very clearly the dynamics of their time of origin, the time of the so-called Great Colonization. The identity-forming power of the Greek myth-history lay precisely in the fact that it re-located its own experiences into the past. What they had constructed themselves appeared to the Greeks as their past.

The Roman fortress of Babylon, Qaṣr al-Shamʿ or Qaṣr al-Rūm in medieval sources, and now known as Miṣr al-Qadīma or Old Cairo, is a logical place to begin in “setting the scene,” chronologically and topographically, for the foundation of the early Islamic miṣr of Fusṭāṭ. However, the fortress represents much more than merely an exotic historical backdrop to later events, and it is the aim of this chapter to explore some aspects of the central role it played in the foundation and subsequent development of Fusṭāṭ following the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641 CE. In particular, we will argue that archaeological evidence for the original size of the fortress and the layout of its buildings and streets shows how these explicitly dictated the form of the centre-ville of Fusṭāṭ. The northern half of the fortress with its large, high-status buildings was integrated into the elite areas at the core of the new city, arranged around an administrative and ceremonial space created by the Friday mosque of ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ and the governor’s residence. We will also demonstrate that much of the space for the central quarters of the new city was only made available by a major rerouting of the Red Sea Canal, and that archaeological evidence from the Church of Abū Sarga indicates the significant part played by the Christian population in the overall urban project.

Herodotus’ (fifth century BCE) famous assertion that Egyptians are the “opposite to other men in almost all matters” (2.83) has set the tone for analyses of Egypt ever since. On the one hand, Egypt’s incomparably rich documentary record, preserved in the papyri and other material remains, has attracted extraordinary scholarly attention. On the other hand, Egypt’s unusual geography and the specialized kinds of agricultural and social organization has given rise to it being seen as non-representative. Moreover, a scholarly view that tends to look from the imperial center outward sees Egypt on the margins, leading to a characterization of its historical developments – not always explicitly acknowledged – as at once exceptional and peripheral.

A discussion of Egypt’s incorporation into the larger structures of an emerging Muslim empire should also touch upon the question when Egypt, from north to south, was entirely under Muslim dominion in the seventh century.1 Whereas the Muslim literary sources provide plenty of information about the conquest of the Nile Delta, and to some extent also that of Middle Egypt,2 our knowledge of the situation at the southern limes of the Byzantine empire, the last bastion to fall to the Muslims, is still very incomplete. How effective was the border defense in this strategic area – against enemies from both the south and the north? Was the Byzantine empire indeed not able to defend this part against aggressors? But why then, according to literary sources, could the Muslims only take Aswān in 652, a decade after the conquest of northern Egypt?

The community of Egyptian jurists is best known from the second half of the eighth century, under the first Abbasids onwards, when their interactions with other provinces increased. The community’s most famous scholar, al-Layth b. Saʿd (d. 175/791), an early Abbasid jurist, maintained a correspondence with his alter ego in Medina, Mālik b. Anas (d. 179/795), with whom he debated legal doctrine. However, Egyptian jurists before 132/750 have been little studied.*Joseph Schacht maintains that Egypt did not develop any original school of law, and that its jurists followed the Medinan legal tradition. His conclusions, however, are not based on any in-depth study of the Egyptian milieu during the Umayyad period, but rather on the later writings of al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820).1 Yet, as I have shown in a previous study, al-Layth b. Saʿd both proclaimed his respect for the Medinan legal school and supported an autonomous Egyptian legal tradition, based on the jurisprudence of Companions who had taken part in the conquest of the province.