Coptic Orthodox Sanctuary, Cairo

This portion of the church was sustained in the early centuries by the power of Egyptian desert monasticism. Coptic Christianity developed a markedly monophysite theology after the Council of Chalcedon (451). It survived the Islamic conquest in part because it was so strongly embedded in rural rather than urban life and because it was highly indigenized. Its strength was in Nubia and it resisted Islamification until the fifteenth century.