IN SOME OF THE stations of the London Underground, the alighting and mounting passengers are cautioned by the baleful tannoy to “Mind the gap! Mind the gap!” When surveying the materials available to the historian and archaeologist in their quest for understanding the situation which obtained in Egypt at the time of the Arab conquest, one is somewhat appalled at the gap which looms over the seventh century as a whole, and more particularly over the first Islamic century of conquest and settlement, ca. 650-750. Except for the fugitive papyrus fragments, the contemporary historical sources are practically mute or inchoate of data. Butler, no less than Guest and Casanova and Kubiak, I could make sense out of these only through appeal to the Arabic sources, the earliest secure one being Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, who died in 257/870-71. He managed to quote a chain of authorities which could take him back only as far as 128/745-46. Nevertheless, he does provide us with our first coherent “chain of events”, covering the period from the advent of ‘Amr into Egypt, his siege of the fortress at Babylon, his attack on Alexandria, the capitulation of the same, the enforced return to al-Fustat and his establishment of it as the campcapital of Islamic Egypt.

The settlement pattern in the new capital can only be hypothesized for the early period. We know that the land around the riverain fortress of Bab al-Yun (more familiarly known as Babylon, a name ascribed to the area of the earliest settlement by European cartographers through to the seventeenth century) was parcelled out in allotments (khiṭṭa, pl. khi.ta.t, to the tribal contingents of ‘Amr's army, with a special khiṭṭa reserved for the command structure, known as the ahl al-rāya (people of the banner), drawn from the various tribes or individuals attached either by the Caliph from his entourage at Medina or by ‘Amr himself as a result of his experiences on the preceding Syrian campaign. When the sources are read carefully, an unfocussed pattern emerges: a) any given tribe could hold land in two places; b) the tribal dispositions do not seem to have a coherent reasoning, whether guided by numbers or influence or consanguineous ties reflecting the power structures at Mecca and Medina; c) exchanges of khiṭaṭ, or portions of them, took place such that there could be entire or partial replacement of tribal units (thus the important differences in the tribal maps of Guest and Kubiak (Figs. 32-33); and d) (of prime importance to our discussion) these sources say nothing of the types of building erected after the return from Alexandria, though one gets the impression that the earlier tents were replaced by more permanent housing of unknown plan and partitioning.