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Of the necessity of this course of policy in the opinion of the Egyptian kings, we can have no better proof than the fact that Psammetichus himself continued the siege of Azotus for twenty-nine years; that his son Necho reopened the canal between the Nile at Bubastes and the Red Sea at Suez it was wide enough for two ships to pass and on being resisted therein by the priests, who feared that it might weaken the country strategically, attempted the circumnavigation of Africa, and actually accomplished it.
Jeremiah earnestly endeavored to dissuade his sovereign from embarking in so doubtful a war; even Necho tried to convince him through his envoys that he made war on Nineveh, not on Jerusalem, invoking as most intensely earnest men did in those days of tremendous impulse the sacred name of Deity as his authentication. Said he: "What have I to do with thee, thou King of Judah?
The defeat of Necho at Carchemish handed Palestine over to the Babylonians, and indirectly brought about the destruction of Jerusalem; even in the age of the Ptolemies Egypt still influenced the history of Israel, and the Jews of Alexandria prepared the way for the Christian Church.
There is a fine specimen at the Louvre, and another in the museum at Leydeu. For an account of every stage and detail in the glass and glaze manufactures of Tell el Amarna, see W.M.F. Petrie's Tell el Amarna. Klaft, i.e., a headdress of folded linen. The beautiful little head here referred to is in the Gizeh Museum, and is a portrait of the Pharaoh Necho.
It has already been remarked, that as the alleged circumnavigation of Africa by the Phoenicians took place during the reign of Necho, the successor of Psammeticus, the grounds for its authenticity are much stronger than if it had occurred previously to the intercourse of the Greeks with Egypt.
The ancient Egyptians, whose attention was much absorbed in waterworks and means of irrigation, had, as far back as the days of Sesostris, conceived the idea of communication between the Nile and the Red Sea. Traces of the canal that they attempted still remain. Pharaoh Necho, in the days of the Prophet Jeremiah, revived the project.
The first authentic account of the carrying out of the conception of an inter-sea water way is to be found in the time of Pharaoh Necho II., about the year 610 B.C. Herodotus records of Necho that he was "the first to attempt the construction of the canal to the Red Sea."
Pharaoh Necho had been for three years in possession of the whole strip along the Mediterranean Palestine, Phoenicia, and part of Syria and was pushing victoriously on to Assyria, when he was met at the plain of Megiddo, commanding the principal pass in the range of Mount Carmel, by the forces of the petty kingdom of Judah, disputing his advance.
This would take us back approximately a thousand years to 700 B.C., or about the time that Pharaoh Necho of Egypt sent out the Phoenician expedition which circumnavigated Africa, and possibly before the time when Hanno, the Carthaginian, explored the west coast of Africa. By the middle of the eleventh century Ghana was the principal kingdom in the western Sudan.
To him he assigns every great work of which the author was unknown, the canals in the Delta, the statue of Amenhôthes III., the obelisks of Ramses II., the distant navigation under Necho, the mounds and trenches dug against Assyrian and Persian invasion, and even the great ship of Ptolemy Philopator; and not knowing that Southern Arabia and even Ethiopia had by the Alexandrians been sometimes called India, he says that this hero conquered even India beyond the Ganges.
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