his strict order were pitilessly mutilated, while a number of
them, rebelling against the payment of the tax, retired into convents,
thinking they could safely defraud the treasury. Assama, however, sent
his soldiers to search these retreats, and all the monks found without
rings were beheaded or put to death by the bastinado.

[Illustration: 338.jpg COIN OF MALIK]

Careful about all that related to the Egyptian revenues, Assama
commanded the keeping up of the various Nilometers, which still served
to regulate the assessment of the ground tax. In the year 718 he learned
that the Nilometer established at Helwan, a little below Fostat, had
fallen in, and hastened to report the fact to the caliph. By the orders
of this prince the ruined Nilometer was abandoned, and a new one built
at the meridional point of the island now called Rhodha, just between
Fostat and Gizeh.

[Illustration: 339.jpg CITADEL OF CAIRO (FOSTAT).]

But of all the financial transactions of Assama, the one that vexed most
the inhabitants of Egypt, and which brought down on him the most violent
and implacable hatred, was the ordinance by which all ascending or
descending the Nile were obliged to provide themselves with a passport
bearing a tax. This exorbitant claim was carried out with an abusive
and arbitrary sternness. A poor widow, the Oriental writers say, was
travelling up the Nile with her son, having with her a correct passport,
the payment of which had taken nearly all she possessed. The young man,
while stretched along the boat to drink of the river's water, was seized
by a crocodile and swallowed, together with the passport he carried
in his breast. The treasury officers insisted that the wretched widow
should take a fresh one; and to obtain payment for it she sold all she
had, even to the very clothes she wore. Such intolerable exactions
and excesses ended by thoroughly rousing the indignant Egyptians. The
malcontents assembled, and a general revolt would have been the result
but for the news of the death of the Caliph Suleiman (717), which gave
birth to the hope that justice might be obtained from his successor.

The next caliph was Omar II., a grandson of Merwan I., who had been
nominated as his successor by Suleiman. In his reign the Muhammedans
were repulsed from Constantinople, and the political movement began
which finally established the Abbasid dynasty at Baghdad. Omar dying
in the year 720, Yazid II., a son of Abd el-Malik, succee