d to the beauty of the
capital, but gave employment to innumerable craftsmen.

The inhabitants of Egypt accepted the new _regime_ with their habitual
phlegm. An Ikshidi officer in the Bashmur district of Lower Egypt did,
indeed, incite the people to rebellion, but his fate was not such as to
encourage others. He was chased out of Egypt, captured on the coast of
Palestine, and then, it is gravely recorded, he was given sesame oil to
drink for a month, till his skin stripped off, whereupon it was stuffed
with straw and hung up on a beam, as a reminder to him who would be
admonished. With this brief exception we read of no riots, no sectarian
risings, and the general surrender was complete when the remaining
partisans of the deposed dynasty, to the number of five thousand, laid
down their arms. An embassy sent to George, King of Nubia, to invite him
to embrace Islam, and to exact the customary tribute, was received with
courtesy, and the money, but not the conversion, was arranged. The holy
cities of Mecca and Medina in the Higaz, where the gold of Moizz had
been prudently distributed some years before, responded to his
generosity and success by proclaiming his supremacy in the mosques; the
Hamdanide prince who held Northern Syria paid similar homage to the
Fatimite Caliph at Aleppo, where the Abbassides had hitherto been
recognized. Southern Syria, however, which had formed part of the
Ikshid's kingdom, did not submit to the usurpers without a struggle.
Hoseyn was still independent at Ramla, and Gawhar's lieutenant, Giafar
ben Fellah, was obliged to give him battle. Hoseyn was defeated and
exposed bareheaded to the insults of the mob at Fustat, to be finally
sent, with the rest of the family of Ikshid, to a Barbary jail.
Damascus, the home of orthodoxy, was taken by Giafar, not without a
struggle, and the Fatimite doctrine was there published, to the
indignation and disgust of the Sunnite population.

A worse plague than the Fatimite conquest soon afflicted Syria. The
Karmati leader, Hasan ben Ahmad, surnamed El-Asam, finding the
blackmail, which he had lately received out of the revenues of Damascus,
suddenly stopped, resolved to extort it by force of arms. The Fatimites
indeed sprang from the same movement, and their founder professed the
same political and irreligious philosophy as Hasan himself; but this did
not stand in his way, and his knowledge of their origin made him the
less disposed to render homage to the sac