Asyūṭ in the 1260's (1844-53)

Abstract

The early thirteenth-century poet, Ibn al-SactI, penned a few memorable lines about Asyut, extolling the beauty of its rural setting, a mythological bird seen in the light of the full moon, the pearl-like quality of the morning dew, a brook, gentle breezes and clouds that speckled the firmament, his muse playing nonsensically with the rhyming possibilities of the final ta in the spelling of the city's name.1 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the poet's idyllic vision had been replaced by a gaudier panorama of riverside palazzos and fast-running, smartly harnessed victorias. The evolution that made this possible began in the 1260's a.h., or the decade sitting on either side of the mid-nineteenth century mark, when klondike fever swept not only the docks and backstreets of Alexandria and the by-ways of the Muski and Bayn al-Qasrayn in Cairo but also the heart of Upper Egypt. Of interest here is the physical, social and economic setting of those vibrant times.