Appearence and tactics of early 5th century Saxons.

[Robert Vermaat]

one might contrast this with the situation of Egypt; which had a very large non Arab population and a very deeply rooted and sophisticated culture when it was Byzantine; we can be quite sure the number of Arabs who moved into the country didn't outnumber the natives. Yet the survival of the pre-Arab culture is limited to a very marginalized group of Copts, and I think the language survives primarily as a liturgical one.

Hi Felix, What you say about the coptic language is true, however, my understanding is that they retain much more of it in their verison of Arabic than English does British. One other aspect is that Coptic had been weakened a little by the earlier Greek invasion of Alexander, when Greek became the language of government.

Felix' point was that the bulk of Egypt lost most if not all pre-Arabic culture except for the marginanlised Copts. I would compare that to the situation of Britain, where the British culture had also been weakened by the Roman occupation and is only preserved by the marginalised Welsh.

No, I don't say it's exactly the same, but I would merely use it as an example of acculturation without a mass migration or large-scale displacement. Similar processes happened, around the same time.