The western half of the region, consisting of the countries round the eastern Mediterranean from the Bosphorus to the Nile delta, had all become part of the Roman Empire. Its ancient civilizations had fallen into decline, and its ancient cities were ruled by Roman governors or native puppet princes. The eastern half of the region belonged to another vast empire, which the Greeks, and after them the Romans, called 'Persia', and which its inhabitants call 'Iran'.
The political map of the region, both in its outward form and in the realities which it represents, was very different from the present day. The names of the countries were not the same, nor were the territorial entities which they designated. Most of the peoples who lived in them at that time spoke different languages and professed different religions from those of today. Some even of the few exceptions are more apparent than real, representing a conscious evocation of a rediscovered antiquity rather than an uninterrupted survival of ancient traditions.
The map of southwest Asia and northeast Africa, in the era of PersoRoman domination and rivalry, was also very different from that of the more ancient Middle Eastern empires and cultures, most of which had been conquered and assimilated by stronger neighbours long before the Macedonian phalanx, the Roman legion, or the Persian cataphract established their domination. Of the older cultures that had survived until the beginning of the Christian era, retaining something of their old identity and*their old language, the most ancient was surely that of Egypt. Sharply defined by both geography and history, Egypt consists of the lower valley and the delta of the Nile, bounded by the eastern and western deserts and the sea in the north. Its civilization was already thousands of years old when the conquerors came, and yet, despite successive conquests by the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans, Egyptian civilization had preserved much of its distinctive quality.
The ancient Egyptian language and writing had, in the course of the millennia, undergone several changes, but show a remarkable continuity. Both the ancient hieroglyphic script and the so-called demotic, a more cursive style of writing which succeeded it, survived into the early Christian centuries, when they were finally supplanted by Coptic - the last form of the ancient Egyptian language, transcribed in an alphabet adapted from the Greek, with additional letters derived from demotic. The Coptic script first appears in the second century BCE and was stabilized in the first century CE. With the conversion of the Egyptians to Christianity, it became the national cultural language of Christian Egypt under Roman and then under Byzantine rule. After the Islamic Arab conquest and the subsequent Islamization and Arabization of Egypt, even those Egyptians who remained Christian adopted the Arabic language. They are still called Copts, but the Coptic language gradually died out and survives at the present day only in the liturgy of the Coptic Church. Egypt had acquired a new identity.
Persia's Regional Policy in Late Middle Ages: Safavids
