After the Arab conquest of 639–42 CE Egypt became part of the burgeoning Islamic empire. Over the course of the seventh and eighth centuries a series of measures was introduced by the new rulers. They established a dīwān in Egypt’s new capital, Fusṭāṭ, a postal service, a system of corvées targeted toward equipping the navy and providing labor for major construction projects, and a new religious poll tax payable by all adult non-Muslim men. This period is characterized by increasing Arabization (the use of Arabic) and Islamization (the appointment of Muslim officials throughout the country, replacing local officials).1 The wealth of the surviving textual sources from Egypt – in Arabic (the language of the new rulers), Greek (the administrative and legal language of the previous regime, as well as that of a considerable number of the population), and Coptic (the indigenous language) – is unrivaled and allows us to examine language use in the country after the conquest in a way that is not possible for other provinces in the empire.

Developments in third/ninth-century Egypt relate to the wider history of the Abbasid imperial realm in a number of ways. These had to do, in one sense or another, with the fraying of the Arab Islamic empire, governed, at this point, by the Abbasid house.1 This chapter considers one such development: the turn to control over Egypt by the Turkic–Central Asian military command in Samarra. My argument is that, at a moment in which the Abbasid state was struggling to sustain its hold over a once far-flung but now shrinking domain, it ceded authority over Egypt to those same military/political circles. Egypt, in this scenario, was a key interest of the Samarran commanders and in defense of which they devoted considerable energy and resources. It was a matter of consolidating authority over the province’s considerable public wealth, to be sure, but the sources point to apparent private interests – specifically, landholdings – on the part of the commanders as well.

The preface introduces some of the main themes of the book and acknowledges funding and support.

Two major questions are crucial for understanding the historical development(s) of Egypt after antiquity. The first one is: How was Egypt embedded in larger structures and developments in the eastern Mediterranean from late Roman times onward? The second one is: How did Egypt operate within these larger networks? In order to address these questions from an archaeological perspective, I set out to take a new look at aspects of the material culture in Egypt during the late antique and early Islamic periods, using a bottom-up perspective. More precisely, it is my intention to discuss both the production and the regional distribution of some of the most widely used pottery types in Egypt from around the seventh to the tenth/eleventh centuries, as well as the medium- and long-distance movements of these ceramic products in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond.1

Chapter three theorizes unruly landscapes through the relations of polities, peoples, and shifting ecologies. It emphasizes the myriad ways in which human-environment relationships are forged relative to a given social and political order. Threaded within a critique of existing conceptions of the political geography of Iron Age Cyprus are arguments for taking seriously the dynamic resources, places and community boundaries, and temporalities of urban and rural terrains. The chapter utilizes claims drawn from rural studies, anthropology and political ecology, and history to investigate settlement hierarchies and resource control, territoriality, and social time.

This chapter provides a review of archaeologies of landscape and outlines where environmental studies reside within these discussions, particularly in the recent rise of climatic and environmental histories of the ancient Mediterranean. Through a review of the challenges of environmental determinism and the interpretive problems of studies of the historical forcing of climatic events in human history, Kearns argues for integrated methodologies that look critically at varied scales of evidence and interpretation. In advocating the study of weathered materials and their instrumentality within ancient landscape studies, the chapter engages with recent archaeological scholarship on materialism that analyzes how things act and effect historical change. Kearns contends that differentiated entanglements of communities and their physical, changing surroundings contributed to transformations in social and political evaluations of land, place, and status.

Egypt’s position in the caliphate has generally been considered either as loosely tributary, with its governors running the province more or less as a personal possession, granting the caliph a share of the province’s riches, as it pleased them, or as the outer rim of a radial system extending from the caliph’s capital and through which caliphal power was exercised by means of administrative control and military force. In this model – which looks from the center outwards – Egypt is located at the decision-making periphery of the Muslim empire, the recipient of directives and consumer of developments initiated at the imperial capital (first located in Medina, then Damascus, and finally Baghdad), where the sneezes that precipitated all of the caliphate’s colds occurred.

This chapter takes a different view. By examining Egypt’s relationship to the imperial center between the Arab conquest and the establishment of the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo in 969 CE, and the complex, ambiguous, and shifting processes of interdependency, caliphal ambition, and local self-assertion as they appear in the sources, I will argue that at all times Egypt’s centrality to the caliphate was a two-way relationship, in which Egypt occupied a key place in caliphal strategic thinking, and in which Egyptians saw themselves as intrinsic to the Muslim imperial project.