II.].VL IN THE MIDDLE AGES 133

The Futuh el Bulddn of el Baladhuri, written about 868 a.d., is

the earliest complete extant record of the conquest from the pen of an

Arab, and the author makes it clear that even in the ninth century

there was the greatest difference of opinion concerning the subject. As

regards the question of the tribal composition of the forces which

either achieved the conquest or immigrated in the years immedi-

ately following it the record is particularly scanty.

A certain amount of disjointed information is however to be

gleaned from various sources^, and of these the most fruitful is the

treatise written at the beginning of the fifteenth century by el Makrizi on the subject of the Arab tribes settled in Egypt^.

By this time many of the tribes who had taken part in the conquest

of 'Amr ibn el 'Asi had become merged in others who had arrived

at subsequent periods, or had been borne westwards or southwards on the tide of conquest.

VI GudhAm. One notable exception appears to have been the

great Kahtanite tribe of Gudham, of whom a large portion had in

1400 A.D. been occupying the Eastern Delta ["el Hauf"] for some

750 years ^. They and the Beni Lakhm were the chief rivals of the

Kaysite tribes in that locality^.

They were originally a branch of the Beni Tai from the Yemen,

but they had so completely broken away from the parent stem that

they may be considered as entirely separate. In the era preceding

Islam they were settled with some Beni Lakhm and branches of Kuda'a in the northern Hegaz from the Red Sea inland to the terri-

tory of the Beni Kelb^.

The tribe was originally divided into two great branches, the Beni Hishm and the Beni Haram^, each with numerous subdivisions. Few of the former, but practically all the latter, seem to have been

settled in Egypt'.

Those in the Hauf in the fifteenth century fell under two main

^ See the chapter which follows.

* This treatise, which was found at the time of Napoleon's expedition and taken away from Egypt, has been summarized by Quatremere in his Memoiies Geographiques . . . , and supplemented from other MSS. He calls his precis Memoire sur les tribiis Arabes etablies en £gypte. Wustenfeld has also made considerable use of it in his Register zii den genealogischen Tabellen der Arabischen Stdmme und Familien : he refers to it as Abhandlung iiber die in Aegypten eingewanderten arabischen Stdmme.

^ Makrfzi's Memoire..., ap. Quatremere (ll, 195).

•• E.g. in 813 A.D.; see following chapter.

* Caussin de Perceval, li, 232;

* Wustenfeld, 5 (for which see Tree i at the end of this Part, p. 191). InQuatre- mere's Memoires, "Haram" (^^^) appears as "Garam" {jaj.a^).

'' I.e. nearly all the sub-tribes of Beni Haram mentioned by Wustenfeld are included in Makrizi's list of tribes in Egypt.