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Chapter 135: Of Kemetian Civil War and Forestry in Palestine
Kemet.
The dominions of the successors of Boutros the Builder saw even further territorial acquisitions. In the east, after Sarkis of Trazark has weakened Syria, king Shenouda of Kemet seized the opportunity and secured the Holy Land. True enough, the arid Siani Peninsula and the Wall of Boutros the builder did offer a strong defense, but the temptation of seizing control over the Holy Land and Jerusalem itself was once again too great. Apart from its strategic importance as a buffer state, it had a deep spiritual significance.
While Kashromi and Rakote remain important cities with populations of 50 000 and 35 000 people, the city of Tamiat has grown to an astonishing 70 000 people, more than doubling its population during the last century. The city´s strategic location, as its proximity to the Red Sea have caused it to become the major trade hub and stop on the way to Ethiopia and India.
Following Boutros´ project with building the Wall to keep foreign invaders at bay, merchants and engineers were beginning of thinking about ways how to connect the Mediterranean and Red Seas. It turned out that the easiest way was to dig again the Canal of the Pharaohs, which would connect the eastern courses of the Nile with the Bitter Lake and then the Red Sea.
View attachment 593920
The couse of the Canal of the Pharaohs
This ambitious project would require even more labour, and even more slaves were bought at the Kinari Coast to Kemet, where they were charged to the hard manual labour.
Since the time of Boutros, the society of Kemet underwent some transformation. While in Upper Egypt, it is predominantly the Church which remains the largest and most powerful institution, in Lower Egypt, the landed nobility has gradually come to overshadow the influence of both the bureaucrats and the Church, while a more commercial and independent-minded attitude in the cities has been growing. Native Coptic merchants are the ones who dominate the trade with India and the Nubian lands, while Greek and Armenian, as well as Italian merchants are only found trading in the Mediterranean. For Kemet it is important once again to have wood, as little if any forests grow in Kemet. Until now, wood was bought from Italian merchants and exchanged for incense and spices; once in possession of the Holy Land, special edicts of the king instructed thousands of trees to be planted, especially in the mountainous Judean Mountains and in Galilee. Should Kemet´s maritime adventure continue, it needs to have more than enough ships.
However, Shenouda seeking to turn the country into a mercantile and feudal realm appears to have upset a lot of representatives of the old order. By the middle of the 14th century a stern opposition of churchmen and bureaucrats has risen against him, and used the valley of the Nile in Upper Egypt as a bastion of their support. The king Shenoudas relation with Pope Peter V has always been rather bad, and it turns out that a conspiracy of high state officials and churchmen agreed in Kashromi to depose the man who had been seeking to undermine their authority.
View attachment 593921
Some of the mercenary troops in Kemet
The garrison of the barracks in Kashromi – Armenians, Berbers, Beja, Nubians and Arabs all joined this rebellion, and the entirety of Upper Egypt was thus under their firm control. However, a few squadrons of Armenian and Arab cavalry fled to Tamiat, where they informed the king of the revolt. The Arab commander Harith was immediately granted land and titles, as was the Armenian commander Hovhannes. The loyalist forces indeed consisted largely of the Bedouin tribes guarding the Sinai, as well as the largely Coptic, to a lesser extent Armenian force, as well as quickly hired Italian mercenaries, and a few Maronite from Lebanon. Moreover, a number of Palestinians, hastily called to arms was joining the king after landing at Tamiat. Apparently, in the western part of Lower Egypt, the coastal regions including the city of Alexandria supported the king, while the interior declared for the rebels.
The strategies of both opposing forces focused on a rapid takeover of the enemy´s bastion. Thus, unsurprisingly, the opposing forces met in battle halfway between Kashromi a and Tamiat.
While outnumbered, the loyalist forces relied on the highly mobile Arab cavalry and camelry, causing havock in the revolting troops. Many of the mercenary commanders, once the situation looked bleak, laid down weapons and refused to fight further, greatly diminishing the actual strength of the revolting forces. Subsequently, the Berber, Arab and Armenian commanders all joined the loyalist forces.
After the victory king Shenouda marched west and fully seized control of western Lower Egypt, before approaching the city of Kashromi. By this time, responsibility of the city´s defence was passed from hands to hands like a hot potato, and the conspirators were hasty to abandon the city, fleeing to Siout in Upper Egypt. There, finally a man Tadros named assumed firm leadership among the rebels. When Shenouda marched upon the city, it opened its gates and pledged loyalty.
Without much resistance, the royal troops marched upstream, finding only little resistance. Tadros saw that their cause was lost in Kemet. Nevertheless, continued the expedition upstream, gathering all who were sympathetic to his cause. Many bishops and abbots, who spoke up against Shenouda, rallied around him, fearful for the wrath of the king. By the time Tadros reached Shenouda, he had some fifteen thousand men behind him – of them merely four thousand were soldiers.
View attachment 593918
The First Cataract
Upon reaching the First Cataract, he declared that here is the end of their retreat, and heavily fortified the place. Nobatia was to become their refuge – a rather inhospitable land, with the desert on either side of the narrow fertile stretch of the Nile River.
As the loyalist forces were gradually marching upstream, they found the offices burnt down, apparently by the fleeing bureaucrats. The land offered little resistance, but the entire administrative infrastructure was destroyed. The further south they went, the more destruction they met. Entire villages lay deserted. The king understood the message. They were trying to tell him how important they were, how indispensable. What will you do without us?
King Shenouda hastily summoned the Patriarch and asked for explanation. A third of his kingdom lay in devastation by a retreating army of overlooked petty bureaucrats and priests who feared for the loss of their influence. The Pope appears to have had no involvement in all of this, though most probably did not actively seek to prevent it either. Nevertheless, the Church´s land was fully confiscated and distributed among the nobles. The corrupt bureaucracy was dismembered and declared as it partook in treason.
Tadros in Nobatia turned his eye southwards. The previously united kingdoms of Makouria and Alodia have since been split for half a century, during a crisis of dynastic succession, and the two rival kings would thus come to rule the two kingdoms of Alodia and Makouria, respectively. Alodia has allied itself with Ethiopia, while Makouria appears to have been largely devoid of allies.
However, Tadros decides not to waste his men on a risky adventure to attack Makuria. Rather, he builds up his position and waits. Upper Egypt is split among loyal noble families and the entire region ends up split between feudal domains. What happens is that tax revenues gradually fall, as the local barons largely keep their income. And of course, as one travelled up the Nile, royal control would get weaker. King Shenouda sees that the feudal lords are even less effective than the bureaucrats and churchmen he banished but he did not acknowledge his mistake.
Rather, he merely appointed his nephew Markos to Siout to bring the lords of Upper Egypt to reason and make them fulfil their duties. Markos did in fact manage to greatly change the situation, gradually consolidating his rule. He offered pardon to some of the former bureaucrats and restored the influence of the church.
After Shenouda died, it was Markos who managed to seize the throne with the help of his southern lords. Markos was quick to offer pardon to the bureaucrats and the Coptic Church and greatly compensated them. Indeed, he summoned Tadros back from Nobatia and named him his chief advisor.
In 1379, an excellent opportunity for Kemet presented itself. The Rhomaic Empire was fighting a four-sided civil war. Now was the time to strike and seize Cyrenaica, the western borderland of Kemet. While not Kemetic, but Greek in culture, the region has been Kemet´s western march since, well, the Ptolemaic period.
The incorporation of Cyrenaica into Kemet saw an increase of the Greek Orthodox population. The previous compromise, where Alexandria became the seat of the “Bishop of the Greeks in Brucheum and Canopus“ was no longer feasible. The Greek Patriarch of Alexandria, residening in exile in Cyrene, once again found himself within the domains of Kemet.
View attachment 593911
Political map of Kemet and its neighbours. Beige is Kemet. In Arabia, green is Shammar and orange is Yamama
Attitude towards the Greeks was highly unfavourable. Be they Cyrenaic or Alexandrian Greeks, they were viewed as agents of the Rhomaic Empire and a fifth column. Therefore the autonomy of the Greek Church of Alexandria was decided to be cracked upon. It was to be merged with the Coptic Church. The “Bishop of the Greeks in Brucheum and Canopus” was demoted to being a vicar bishop, responsible for the Greek churches in the city of Alexandria; Cyrenaica was made into one archbishopric and was allowed to use Greek as liturgical language (at least for the time being).
However, some of the Cyrenaic and Alexandrian Greeks, especially the clergy fled to Crete, where they set-up a church-in-exile, if that term exists.
In the Levant, however, things were not as easy. The majority of the people of Palestine were under the authority of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who declared his church to follow the principles of the Council of Chalcedon, though did not lean to neither Constantinople nor Rome in the latest schism. Rather, he claimed to continue to be in communion with both.
View attachment 593912
Religion in Kemet. You can clearly see the dominance of the Monophysite church in Egypt.
What was also understood was that enforcing the Monophysite Church in Palestine was unfeasible. Rather, Markos sought to have a nice proper buffer in Palestine, with revolt risk as low as possible. By royal decree, large parts of the country were declared to be royal forests, and cutting down wood was strictly prohibited. The establishment of royal forests meant that there was less agricultural land, and people were rather encouraged to settle in cities, where they were to work as artisans and merchants. Egyptians also promoted the spread of vineyards and olive orchards, more valued luxurious commodities, which were more desired on the Kemetic market than the standard staple crops.
The largest cities were without doubt Acre, followed by Gaza, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Tiberias and Nazareth. The Gersaumians(1), the descendants of Frankish Crusaders, who lived along the coast, had by now become a minority even in the coastal strip, as the Aramaic-speaking peasants flocked in great number to the coastal cities. The Gersaumians spoke a dialect, based upon the mixture of Lengadocian, Neustrian and various Italian dialects, with the local Palestinian Aramaic and Greek. In the cities, the Gersaumian language was indeed on the retreat, and Gersaumian communities continued to be located mainly along the Mediterranean coast and around Lake Galilee.
View attachment 593913
The linguistic expansion of Coptic. The retreat of a large number of Coptic bureaucrats and clergy into Nobatia have effectively Copticised it. In the vicinity of Alexandria, Coptic language also spread slightly, as it did in Jedda. In Palestine, the Latinate language is largely replaced by Aramaic once more.
Regarding the holy sites of Christianity, they were transferred by royal decree to a new Coptic bishop, and it was decreed that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was to be Coptic on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Orthodox on Mondays and Saturdays, Armenian on Tuesdays and Nestorian on Thursdays. This breakdown of the week, with fixed days when service was to be done in which denomination, was also extended to all Biblical sites, with later allowance of Wednesdays to be days of Syriac Jacobite liturgy.
View attachment 593917
What we can see over here is that Greek as the most common script gradually retreats in Palestine in favour of Aramaic
To be sure that everything went smoothly, king Markos appointed a Jewish family (2) in Jerusalem to be caretakers of this timetable and entrusted them the keys to the temple. Why a Jewish family, you may ask? Well, Markos did want that the timetable be respected, and giving it to the Coptic bishop may have led to sectarian tensions. Therefore he chose the Jews, as they were neutral in the disputes amongst Christians themselves, and were thus uninterested. The decision was also officially presented as symbolic, as Jesus and Peter and the Apostles were Jews themselves.
The city of Jerusalem itself was divided into four quarters: The Armenian Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, the Melkite Quarter and the Coptic Quarter (3). While Jewish presence at this time in Palestine is noticeable mainly in cities such Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron, where they make between a quarter and third of the population, there are few if any in the coastal cities or the countryside. This is in contrast with the Samaritans, who are endemic ethno-religious community in the vicinity of Mount Gerizim. Markos did not want trouble and confirmed the hereditary position of the Samaritan chieftain, clarified the boundaries of his domain, confirmed the freedom to practice the Samaritan religion in the area granted and fixed the tribute of the Samaritans (4).
During the 14th century, Kemetic control also extends into Hejaz. Previous arrangements of tributary allegiance were replaced by a more direct form of control. Still though, the importance of the local Arab tribes remains, in guarding the caravan routes from any incursion by the nomadic tribes of Yamanah and Najd.
Originally, Kemet sought to control the area as a means of securing the Red Sea, and by extension, Indian Ocean trade. For Kemet, of key importance were the cities along the coast on the plain of Tihamah – namely Yanbu and Jedda. These cities soon became cosmopolitan - with a large number of Arabic, Ethiopian and Tamil traders, as well as the Copts. It was nevertheless the Arabs from the hinterland that formed the bulk of the populations of these cities – although a mostly forming the lower classes of the cities´ population.
View attachment 593914
A map of major forms of society organization. Notice the large urbanization and feudalization in both Kemet itself and Palestine, and the retreat of theocratic and hierocratic areas.
Mecca continues to be a major cultural centre in the interior of Hejaz, as being the seat an archbishopric. However, by this time, it is already overshadowed by the coastal cities.
To mention briefly the interior regions of Arabia, two major tribal confederations appear: Yamama in the south and Shammar in the north. Due to constraints of the climate, inhabitants of these regions continue to live either as nomadic herdsmen or are settled in the oases.
The dominions of the successors of Boutros the Builder saw even further territorial acquisitions. In the east, after Sarkis of Trazark has weakened Syria, king Shenouda of Kemet seized the opportunity and secured the Holy Land. True enough, the arid Siani Peninsula and the Wall of Boutros the builder did offer a strong defense, but the temptation of seizing control over the Holy Land and Jerusalem itself was once again too great. Apart from its strategic importance as a buffer state, it had a deep spiritual significance.
While Kashromi and Rakote remain important cities with populations of 50 000 and 35 000 people, the city of Tamiat has grown to an astonishing 70 000 people, more than doubling its population during the last century. The city´s strategic location, as its proximity to the Red Sea have caused it to become the major trade hub and stop on the way to Ethiopia and India.
Following Boutros´ project with building the Wall to keep foreign invaders at bay, merchants and engineers were beginning of thinking about ways how to connect the Mediterranean and Red Seas. It turned out that the easiest way was to dig again the Canal of the Pharaohs, which would connect the eastern courses of the Nile with the Bitter Lake and then the Red Sea.
View attachment 593920
The couse of the Canal of the Pharaohs
This ambitious project would require even more labour, and even more slaves were bought at the Kinari Coast to Kemet, where they were charged to the hard manual labour.
Since the time of Boutros, the society of Kemet underwent some transformation. While in Upper Egypt, it is predominantly the Church which remains the largest and most powerful institution, in Lower Egypt, the landed nobility has gradually come to overshadow the influence of both the bureaucrats and the Church, while a more commercial and independent-minded attitude in the cities has been growing. Native Coptic merchants are the ones who dominate the trade with India and the Nubian lands, while Greek and Armenian, as well as Italian merchants are only found trading in the Mediterranean. For Kemet it is important once again to have wood, as little if any forests grow in Kemet. Until now, wood was bought from Italian merchants and exchanged for incense and spices; once in possession of the Holy Land, special edicts of the king instructed thousands of trees to be planted, especially in the mountainous Judean Mountains and in Galilee. Should Kemet´s maritime adventure continue, it needs to have more than enough ships.
However, Shenouda seeking to turn the country into a mercantile and feudal realm appears to have upset a lot of representatives of the old order. By the middle of the 14th century a stern opposition of churchmen and bureaucrats has risen against him, and used the valley of the Nile in Upper Egypt as a bastion of their support. The king Shenoudas relation with Pope Peter V has always been rather bad, and it turns out that a conspiracy of high state officials and churchmen agreed in Kashromi to depose the man who had been seeking to undermine their authority.
View attachment 593921
Some of the mercenary troops in Kemet
The garrison of the barracks in Kashromi – Armenians, Berbers, Beja, Nubians and Arabs all joined this rebellion, and the entirety of Upper Egypt was thus under their firm control. However, a few squadrons of Armenian and Arab cavalry fled to Tamiat, where they informed the king of the revolt. The Arab commander Harith was immediately granted land and titles, as was the Armenian commander Hovhannes. The loyalist forces indeed consisted largely of the Bedouin tribes guarding the Sinai, as well as the largely Coptic, to a lesser extent Armenian force, as well as quickly hired Italian mercenaries, and a few Maronite from Lebanon. Moreover, a number of Palestinians, hastily called to arms was joining the king after landing at Tamiat. Apparently, in the western part of Lower Egypt, the coastal regions including the city of Alexandria supported the king, while the interior declared for the rebels.
The strategies of both opposing forces focused on a rapid takeover of the enemy´s bastion. Thus, unsurprisingly, the opposing forces met in battle halfway between Kashromi a and Tamiat.
While outnumbered, the loyalist forces relied on the highly mobile Arab cavalry and camelry, causing havock in the revolting troops. Many of the mercenary commanders, once the situation looked bleak, laid down weapons and refused to fight further, greatly diminishing the actual strength of the revolting forces. Subsequently, the Berber, Arab and Armenian commanders all joined the loyalist forces.
After the victory king Shenouda marched west and fully seized control of western Lower Egypt, before approaching the city of Kashromi. By this time, responsibility of the city´s defence was passed from hands to hands like a hot potato, and the conspirators were hasty to abandon the city, fleeing to Siout in Upper Egypt. There, finally a man Tadros named assumed firm leadership among the rebels. When Shenouda marched upon the city, it opened its gates and pledged loyalty.
Without much resistance, the royal troops marched upstream, finding only little resistance. Tadros saw that their cause was lost in Kemet. Nevertheless, continued the expedition upstream, gathering all who were sympathetic to his cause. Many bishops and abbots, who spoke up against Shenouda, rallied around him, fearful for the wrath of the king. By the time Tadros reached Shenouda, he had some fifteen thousand men behind him – of them merely four thousand were soldiers.
View attachment 593918
The First Cataract
Upon reaching the First Cataract, he declared that here is the end of their retreat, and heavily fortified the place. Nobatia was to become their refuge – a rather inhospitable land, with the desert on either side of the narrow fertile stretch of the Nile River.
As the loyalist forces were gradually marching upstream, they found the offices burnt down, apparently by the fleeing bureaucrats. The land offered little resistance, but the entire administrative infrastructure was destroyed. The further south they went, the more destruction they met. Entire villages lay deserted. The king understood the message. They were trying to tell him how important they were, how indispensable. What will you do without us?
King Shenouda hastily summoned the Patriarch and asked for explanation. A third of his kingdom lay in devastation by a retreating army of overlooked petty bureaucrats and priests who feared for the loss of their influence. The Pope appears to have had no involvement in all of this, though most probably did not actively seek to prevent it either. Nevertheless, the Church´s land was fully confiscated and distributed among the nobles. The corrupt bureaucracy was dismembered and declared as it partook in treason.
Tadros in Nobatia turned his eye southwards. The previously united kingdoms of Makouria and Alodia have since been split for half a century, during a crisis of dynastic succession, and the two rival kings would thus come to rule the two kingdoms of Alodia and Makouria, respectively. Alodia has allied itself with Ethiopia, while Makouria appears to have been largely devoid of allies.
However, Tadros decides not to waste his men on a risky adventure to attack Makuria. Rather, he builds up his position and waits. Upper Egypt is split among loyal noble families and the entire region ends up split between feudal domains. What happens is that tax revenues gradually fall, as the local barons largely keep their income. And of course, as one travelled up the Nile, royal control would get weaker. King Shenouda sees that the feudal lords are even less effective than the bureaucrats and churchmen he banished but he did not acknowledge his mistake.
Rather, he merely appointed his nephew Markos to Siout to bring the lords of Upper Egypt to reason and make them fulfil their duties. Markos did in fact manage to greatly change the situation, gradually consolidating his rule. He offered pardon to some of the former bureaucrats and restored the influence of the church.
After Shenouda died, it was Markos who managed to seize the throne with the help of his southern lords. Markos was quick to offer pardon to the bureaucrats and the Coptic Church and greatly compensated them. Indeed, he summoned Tadros back from Nobatia and named him his chief advisor.
In 1379, an excellent opportunity for Kemet presented itself. The Rhomaic Empire was fighting a four-sided civil war. Now was the time to strike and seize Cyrenaica, the western borderland of Kemet. While not Kemetic, but Greek in culture, the region has been Kemet´s western march since, well, the Ptolemaic period.
The incorporation of Cyrenaica into Kemet saw an increase of the Greek Orthodox population. The previous compromise, where Alexandria became the seat of the “Bishop of the Greeks in Brucheum and Canopus“ was no longer feasible. The Greek Patriarch of Alexandria, residening in exile in Cyrene, once again found himself within the domains of Kemet.
View attachment 593911
Political map of Kemet and its neighbours. Beige is Kemet. In Arabia, green is Shammar and orange is Yamama
Attitude towards the Greeks was highly unfavourable. Be they Cyrenaic or Alexandrian Greeks, they were viewed as agents of the Rhomaic Empire and a fifth column. Therefore the autonomy of the Greek Church of Alexandria was decided to be cracked upon. It was to be merged with the Coptic Church. The “Bishop of the Greeks in Brucheum and Canopus” was demoted to being a vicar bishop, responsible for the Greek churches in the city of Alexandria; Cyrenaica was made into one archbishopric and was allowed to use Greek as liturgical language (at least for the time being).
However, some of the Cyrenaic and Alexandrian Greeks, especially the clergy fled to Crete, where they set-up a church-in-exile, if that term exists.
In the Levant, however, things were not as easy. The majority of the people of Palestine were under the authority of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who declared his church to follow the principles of the Council of Chalcedon, though did not lean to neither Constantinople nor Rome in the latest schism. Rather, he claimed to continue to be in communion with both.
View attachment 593912
Religion in Kemet. You can clearly see the dominance of the Monophysite church in Egypt.
What was also understood was that enforcing the Monophysite Church in Palestine was unfeasible. Rather, Markos sought to have a nice proper buffer in Palestine, with revolt risk as low as possible. By royal decree, large parts of the country were declared to be royal forests, and cutting down wood was strictly prohibited. The establishment of royal forests meant that there was less agricultural land, and people were rather encouraged to settle in cities, where they were to work as artisans and merchants. Egyptians also promoted the spread of vineyards and olive orchards, more valued luxurious commodities, which were more desired on the Kemetic market than the standard staple crops.
The largest cities were without doubt Acre, followed by Gaza, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Tiberias and Nazareth. The Gersaumians(1), the descendants of Frankish Crusaders, who lived along the coast, had by now become a minority even in the coastal strip, as the Aramaic-speaking peasants flocked in great number to the coastal cities. The Gersaumians spoke a dialect, based upon the mixture of Lengadocian, Neustrian and various Italian dialects, with the local Palestinian Aramaic and Greek. In the cities, the Gersaumian language was indeed on the retreat, and Gersaumian communities continued to be located mainly along the Mediterranean coast and around Lake Galilee.
View attachment 593913
The linguistic expansion of Coptic. The retreat of a large number of Coptic bureaucrats and clergy into Nobatia have effectively Copticised it. In the vicinity of Alexandria, Coptic language also spread slightly, as it did in Jedda. In Palestine, the Latinate language is largely replaced by Aramaic once more.
Regarding the holy sites of Christianity, they were transferred by royal decree to a new Coptic bishop, and it was decreed that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was to be Coptic on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Orthodox on Mondays and Saturdays, Armenian on Tuesdays and Nestorian on Thursdays. This breakdown of the week, with fixed days when service was to be done in which denomination, was also extended to all Biblical sites, with later allowance of Wednesdays to be days of Syriac Jacobite liturgy.
View attachment 593917
What we can see over here is that Greek as the most common script gradually retreats in Palestine in favour of Aramaic
To be sure that everything went smoothly, king Markos appointed a Jewish family (2) in Jerusalem to be caretakers of this timetable and entrusted them the keys to the temple. Why a Jewish family, you may ask? Well, Markos did want that the timetable be respected, and giving it to the Coptic bishop may have led to sectarian tensions. Therefore he chose the Jews, as they were neutral in the disputes amongst Christians themselves, and were thus uninterested. The decision was also officially presented as symbolic, as Jesus and Peter and the Apostles were Jews themselves.
The city of Jerusalem itself was divided into four quarters: The Armenian Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, the Melkite Quarter and the Coptic Quarter (3). While Jewish presence at this time in Palestine is noticeable mainly in cities such Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron, where they make between a quarter and third of the population, there are few if any in the coastal cities or the countryside. This is in contrast with the Samaritans, who are endemic ethno-religious community in the vicinity of Mount Gerizim. Markos did not want trouble and confirmed the hereditary position of the Samaritan chieftain, clarified the boundaries of his domain, confirmed the freedom to practice the Samaritan religion in the area granted and fixed the tribute of the Samaritans (4).
During the 14th century, Kemetic control also extends into Hejaz. Previous arrangements of tributary allegiance were replaced by a more direct form of control. Still though, the importance of the local Arab tribes remains, in guarding the caravan routes from any incursion by the nomadic tribes of Yamanah and Najd.
Originally, Kemet sought to control the area as a means of securing the Red Sea, and by extension, Indian Ocean trade. For Kemet, of key importance were the cities along the coast on the plain of Tihamah – namely Yanbu and Jedda. These cities soon became cosmopolitan - with a large number of Arabic, Ethiopian and Tamil traders, as well as the Copts. It was nevertheless the Arabs from the hinterland that formed the bulk of the populations of these cities – although a mostly forming the lower classes of the cities´ population.
View attachment 593914
A map of major forms of society organization. Notice the large urbanization and feudalization in both Kemet itself and Palestine, and the retreat of theocratic and hierocratic areas.
Mecca continues to be a major cultural centre in the interior of Hejaz, as being the seat an archbishopric. However, by this time, it is already overshadowed by the coastal cities.
To mention briefly the interior regions of Arabia, two major tribal confederations appear: Yamama in the south and Shammar in the north. Due to constraints of the climate, inhabitants of these regions continue to live either as nomadic herdsmen or are settled in the oases.
- A hypothetical evolution from Medieval French Jérusalemien
- See the Muslim family that has the keys to Church of holy sepulchre in OTL
- The Melkite Quarter is the Christian quarter of Old Town Jerusalem; the Coptic Quarter is OTL Muslim Quarter.
- This included maintenance of roads, a fixed number of levies, maintenance of the royal forests , and also a number of barrels of wine.
- Tomislav Addai
- Word Count: 2.6k