Ezekiel 29:15 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

It shall be the basest of the kingdoms— By base kingdoms is meant, that it should be tributary and subject to strangers, for the much greater part of the time. This is the purport and meaning of the prophesy; and the truth will appear by a short deduction of the history of Egypt from that time to this. It was first of all tributary to the Babylonians, under Amasis; upon the ruin of the Babylonish empire, it was subject to the Persians; upon the failure of the Persian empire, it came into the hands of the Macedonians; after the Macedonians, it fell under the dominion of the Romans; after the division of the Roman empire, it was subdued by the Saracens, in the reign of Omar, their third emperor; about the year of Christ 1250, it was in the possession of the Mamelucs, a word which signifies "a slave bought with money," but is appropriated to those Turkish or Circassian slaves, whom the sultans of Egypt bought young, and taught military exercises. These slaves usurped the royal authority, and by that means Egypt became their prey. But in the year of Christ 1517, Selim, the ninth emperor of the Turks, conquered the Mamelucs, and annexed Egypt to the Ottoman empire, of which it has continued to be a province to this day; except during the very short interval when it was lately in the hands of the French. It has been governed under the Turkish emperor by a Turkish basha, with 24 beys or princes under him, who were advanced from servitude to the administration of public affairs; a superstitious nation possessing the Egyptians, that it is decreed by fate that captives shall reign, and the natives be subject to them; a notion which, in all probability, was at first derived from some mistaken tradition of these prophesies, that Egypt should be a base kingdom; that there should be no more a prince of the land of Egypt; and that Ham, in his posterity, should be a servant of servants unto his brethren. By this deduction it appears, that the truth of Ezekiel's prediction is fulfilled by the whole series of the history of Egypt, from that time to the present. And who could pretend to say, upon human conjecture, that so great a kingdom, so rich and fertile a country, should ever afterwards become tributary and subject to strangers. It is now much more than 2000 years since this prophesy was first delivered; and what likelihood or appearance was there, that the Egyptians should, for so many ages, bow under a foreign yoke, and never in all that time be able to recover their liberties, and have a prince of their own to reign over them? See Bishop Newton.