eography,
astrology, etc., at Cairo, and his Egyptian history and topography is
still an important work, describing the state of the country and its
rulers. He died at Cairo, A.D. 1442. Some of his works have been
translated into French and Latin, and are still referred to.

In honour of Sayuti, that colossus of learning, who cultivated,
according to the spirit of his times, so many sciences, and dealt with
them practically, this might be called the poly-historical and
poly-geographical period. Julal-uddin Sayuti is said to be the author
of some four hundred works, and he died in A.D. 1505, some twelve years
before the conquest of Egypt by Selim I, the Sultan of Turkey, when
independent Arab literature under Arab sovereigns came to an end. It
is true enough that not only in Egypt and Syria, but also in Turkey
and Persia, Arabic books were written afterwards, but more under
foreign protection, although in the two first-named countries Arabic
is the language of the people, while in the last two it occupies
nearly the same position that Latin does in European universities and
in the Roman Catholic Church.

In the tenth century of the Hijrah (A.D. 1495-1592) the generally
prevalent belief that the world would, at the completion of it, come
to an end, contributed much to the gradual decay of science and
literature. The case is somewhat analogous to the superstition in
Europe some six hundred years previously, when the Christian era
attained its millennium, which was considered to carry with it the
same catastrophe. This prophecy, believed to be true, contributed in
some measure to slacken authority as well as exertion, and the power
of Islamitic countries really sank; but this might have been predicted
without any prophetic foresight. In one part of Islam, the ruin of
Muhammadan countries thus prophesied was accomplished twenty-one years
before the end of the thousandth year, that is in the 979th year of
the Hijrah, A.D. 1571, by the total expulsion of the Moors from Spain.
Granada itself had succumbed already, seventy-nine years before, and
the unwieldy palace of the kings, of Spain (still unfinished) had
risen by the side of the lofty arcades of the Alhambra, still a lovely
specimen of Moorish artistic design and architecture.

The tenth century of the Hijrah (A.D. 1495-1592), which was the first
of the decay of Arab literature, is to be considered as the period
when the political importance of Turkey culminated in the