he Lower Empire
has yielded much to the explorers of Oxyrrhynchus, and many papyri of
interest belonging to this period have been published by Mr. Kenyon in
his _Catalogue of the Greek Papyri in the British Museum_, especially
the letters of Flavius Abinaeus, a military officer of the fourth
century. The papyri of this period are full of the high-flown titles
and affected phraseology which was so beloved of Byzantine scribes.
"Glorious Dukes of the Thebaid," "most magnificent counts and
lieutenants," "all-praiseworthy secretaries," and the like strut across
the pages of the letters and documents which begin "In the name of Our
Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, the God and Saviour of us all, in
the year x of the reign of the most divine and praised, great, and
beneficent Lord Flavius Heraclius (or other) the eternal Augustus and
Auto-krator, month x, year x of the In diction." It is an extraordinary
period, this of the sixth and seventh centuries, which we have now
entered, with its bizarre combination of the official titulary of
the divine and eternal Caesars Imperatores Augusti with the initial
invocation of Christ and the Trinity. It is the transition from the
ancient to the modern world, and as such has an interest all its own.

In Egypt the struggle between the adherents of Chalcedon, the "Melkites"
or Imperialists of the orthodox Greek rite, and the Eutychians or
Mono-physites, the followers of the patriarch Dioskoros, who rejected
Chalcedon, was going on with unabated fury, and was hardly stopped even
by the invasion of the pagan Persians. The last effort of the party of
Constantinople to stamp out the Monophysite heresy was made when Cyril
was patriarch and governor of Egypt. According to an ingenious theory
put forward by Mr. Butler, in his _Arab Conquest of Egypt_, it is Cyril
the patriarch who was the mysterious Mukaukas, the [Greek word], or
"Great and Magnificent One," who played so doubtful a part in the
epoch-making events of the Arab conquest by Amr in A.D. 639-41. Usually
this Mukaukas has been regarded as a "noble Copt," and the Copts have
generally been credited with having assisted the Islamites against
the power of Constantinople. This was a very natural and probable
conclusion, but Mr. Butler will have it that the Copts resisted the
Arabs valiantly, and that the treacherous Mukaukas was none other than
the Constantinopolitan patriarch himself.

In the papyri it is interesting to note the gradual incre