You see, in the previous empires, like the Assyrian Empire, or these kinds of-- the Egyptian Empire, when people conquered other peoples, often all they wanted was tribute.
The heat got us moving the next morning, and we jammed into a boksi, a brightly-painted pickup fitted with benches, heading north to where we planned to rejoin the Nile and find traces of the upper reaches of the ancient EgyptianEmpire.
In fact, the venerable Iraqi art of maqam was overshadowed during the Ottoman Empire, in large part by the emergence of Egyptian cinema music, and later the great diva of Arabic music in the last century, Umm Kulthum.
