Note (71), page 50.

Sem, the son of Noe,—our author means Palestine and Syria. The Mamalukes of Egypt remained in possession of Sham, or Syria, till the conquest of Timur, 1400 of our era. He mentions in his Institutes, p. 148, the Defeat of the Badishah of Miser and Sham ‎‏شام‏‎. After the retreat of Timur, the Mamalukes again took possession of the country, and held it till the conquest of the Othomans. “Egypt was lost,” says Gibbon, “had she been defended only by her feeble offspring; but the Mamalukes had breathed in their infancy the keenness of the Scythian air; equal in valour, superior in discipline, they met the Moguls in many a well-fought field, and drove back the stream of hostility to the eastward of the Euphrates.”—Gibbon iv. 270. See also p. 175, 261. It is known that “this government of the slaves” lasted by treaty under the descendents of Selim, and was only destroyed in our times by a signal act of treachery of Mehmed, Pasha of Egypt.