First Published in 1973. This volume brings together a number of studies concerned with the Near East and its history from the sixteenth century. They fall into three groups. The first is concerned with English Arabists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and particularly with Edward Pococke. The papers in the second group deal with the history of the Nilotic Sudan, and especially attempt to exploit the sparse source-materials available on the Funj Sultanate and to throw some light on developments between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century. Another dark age in modern Near Eastern history is the subject of the third group of papers-the period of Egyptian history from the Ottoman conquest in 1517 to the French occupation in 1798.