Abstract
The article examines a passage by the 9th-century Islamic-Egyptian scholar Abd al-Rahman ibn Abd al-Hakam about a three-year war between the “Rumis” (i.e., the people of Greece or Rome) and the Egyptians. As a result of this war, the Egyptians acknowledged their submission to the Rumis but secured an agreement that the latter would “leave them”, limiting this submission to the vassal state and paying tribute. A number of considerations indicate that this narrative refl ects the conquest of Egypt by Octavian Augustus, which ended with Egypt’s transformation into a province of the Roman Empire. In this account, Ibn Abd al-Hakam states that these events took place in times of the “Rumis” and the “Persians” rise as the world’s greatest powers. This corresponds to the transformation of Rome and Parthia into superpowers by the 1st century BC. This plot goes back to the information from another Arab historian, Uthman ibn Salih in whose historical scheme the interval between the kings corresponding to the Egyptian XXVIth Dynasty and the conquest by the “Rumis” remains unfi lled with events, and the image of the might of the “Rumis” replaces all previous foreign rulers of Egypt in the 6th–1st centuries BC, while the might of the “Persians” similarly absorbs all stages of Iranian history from the Achaemenids to the Sassanids.
Keywords
Egypt, Islamic-Egyptian tradition, XXVIth Dynasty, Iran, Rome, Ptolemies, Octavian Augustus.