Egyptians the Copts, became dhimmis. In time the power of the Arabs waned throughout the Islamic Empire so that in the 10th century, the Turkish Ikhshids were able to take control of Egypt and made it an independent political unit from the rest of the empire. Egyptians continued to live socially and politically separate from their foreign conquerors, but their rulers like the Ptolemies before them were able to stabilize the country and bring renewed economic prosperity. It was under the Shiite Fatimids from the 10th to the 12th centuries that Muslim Egyptian institutions began to take form along with the
Chronology of the ancient Near East tablets or inscriptions in question still have value, though one does have to keep the slant in mind. Keeping historical lists of rulers was traditional in the ancient Near East. Covers rulers of Mesopotamia from a time "before the flood" up to the fall of the Isin Dynasty. For many early city-states it is the only source of chronological data. A major problem is that many early rulers are listed with fantastically long reigns. There has been some speculation that this stems from an error transcribing from the base 60 arithmetic of the Sumerians to the decimal-based system of the