210 On the Arabiati Frontier of Egypt. 



Thanks to the phenomena brought to light by the flood of 

 1800, there is no difficulty in proving its existence. The 

 only difficulty is to find satisfactory reasons to explain its 

 absence ! 



But there is another desideratum, without which this geo- 

 graphical theory would hardly be complete. As it requires 

 that the Red Sea should have retired from its primitive head 

 since the time of Moses, it will be very interesting to ascer- 

 tain the precise period of its retiring. Now, the solution of 

 this problem is so connected with the history of the ancient 

 canal made to connect the Nile and the sea, and the history 

 of this canal is, in its turn, so inseparable from that of the 

 river it pai'tly supplanted, that by following up the subse- 

 quent destinies of the river, we shall arrive at all we wish to 

 ascertain on the other points. The history of that river af- 

 fords the only clue to guide us out of the labyrinth of per- 

 plexity in which we are entangled by the strangely discordant 

 accounts given by ancient authors concerning the canal, of 

 which Major Rennell so pithily remarks, that " if we credit 

 Herodotus, Darius finished it ; if Diodorus and Strabo, Pto- 

 lemy alone completed it ; and if Pliny, it was never finished 

 at all !" 



As Herodotus, who wrote within eighty years of the reign 

 of Darius, having himself visited Egypt on purpose to gather 

 information, distinctly, and in several places, tells us that 

 the canal tvas finished by Darius — that " it entered the Red 

 Sea,'' " was discharged in the Arabian Gulf," — and, again, 

 in another place, refers to the " Arabian Gulf into which Da- 

 rius introduced a channel of the Nile,"* we cannot doubt that 

 such was the case, without setting aside the most unequivo- 

 cal kind of testimony, — that of a contemporaneous historian 

 and eye-witness, who is generally found faithful in his rela- 

 tion of what he observed. The subsequent retiring of the sea 

 may have rendered necessary the additional operations histo- 

 rically attributed to Ptolemy Philadelphus and to Trajan ; 

 but to doubt that, in the time of Darius Hystaspes, the junc- 

 tion of the Nile with the Arabian Gulf, as far as it extended, 



* Herodotus, Euterpe, clviii, Melpomene, xxxix. 



