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158.
Psammetichus had a son, Necos, who became king of Egypt. It was he who began building the canal into the Red Sea,1 which was finished by Darius the Persian. This is four days' voyage in length, and it was dug wide enough for two triremes to move in it rowed abreast.
[2]
It is fed by the Nile, and is carried from a little above Bubastis by the Arabian town of Patumus; it issues into the Red Sea. Digging began in the part of the Egyptian plain nearest to Arabia; the mountains that extend to Memphis (the mountains where the stone quarries are) come close to this plain;
[3]
the canal is led along the foothills of these mountains in a long reach from west to east; passing then into a ravine, it bears southward out of the hill country towards the Arabian Gulf.
[4]
Now the shortest and most direct passage from the northern to the southern or Red Sea is from the Casian promontory, the boundary between Egypt and Syria, to the Arabian Gulf, and this is a distance of one hundred and twenty five miles, neither more nor less;
[5]
this is the most direct route, but the canal is far longer, inasmuch as it is more crooked. In Necos' reign, a hundred and twenty thousand Egyptians died digging it. Necos stopped work, stayed by a prophetic utterance that he was toiling beforehand for the barbarian. The Egyptians call all men of other languages barbarians.
Herodotus, with an English translation by A. D. Godley. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1920.
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References (20 total)
- Cross-references to this page
(9):
- Harper's, Neco
- Harper's, Patūmus
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), AEGYPTUS
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), BUBASTIS
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), FONTES AMARI
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), NILUS
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), RUBRUM MARE
- William Watson Goodwin, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb, Chapter VI
- Smith's Bio, Neco
- Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (11):
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