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Updated: July 23, 2025
Now as the feast went on, the wine flowed fast, till Antony and the Queen grew merry. And she told him of her plans, and of how even now her galleys were being drawn by the canal that leads from Bubastis on the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, to Clysma at the head of the Bay of Heroopolis.
The most easterly of the channels by which the waters of the river find their way through the Delta to the sea, is called, as it will be seen marked upon the map, the Pelusiac branch. It forms almost the boundary of the fertile region of the Delta on the eastern side. There was an ancient city named Pelusium near the mouth of it.
Between the Rosetta and the Damietta branches of the Nile there are other canals, such as the Manuf, which connects the two branches of the river at a point not far from the Delta. East of the Damietta branch are other canals, occupying the ancient river-beds of the Tanitic and Pelusiac branches of the Nile.
It was found at Tell Defenneh, on the right bank of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, close to the old Egyptian highway into Syria, a site which may be identified with that of the biblical Tahpanhes and the Daphnae of the Greeks. Here it was that the Jewish fugitives, fleeing with Jeremiah after the fall of Jerusalem, founded a Jewish colony beside a flourishing Phoenician and Aramaean settlement.
This canal began in the Pelusiac branch of the river, a little above Bubastis, and was carried to the Lower Bitter Lakes in the reign of Darius. From thence Philadelphus wished to carry it forward to the Red Sea, near the town of Arsinoë, and moreover cleared it from the sands which soon overwhelmed it and choked it up whenever it was neglected by the government.
There was likewise a royal hunting-box on this site, and all the principal parts of the settlement were found to have been surrounded by a wall fifty feet thick, which enclosed an area of three thousand feet in length and one thousand in breadth. The gate on the north opened towards the Pelusiac canal, and the south looked out upon the ancient military road which led up from Egypt to Syria.
But while it appears to be probable that consequences of some importance followed on the Pelusiac calamity, it is tolerably certain that no such tremendous results flowed from it as some writers have imagined. The total destruction of the empire in consequence of the blow, is an exaggeration of Josephus, rashly credited by some moderns.
According to Aristotle, Strabo, and Pliny, Sesostris was the first to conceive and carry out the idea of a water connection between the two seas, by means of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile from Avaris to Bubastis, and by rendering navigable the irrigation canal which already existed between Bubastis and Heroopolis.
On one of these the name of Darius is written in the Persian cuneiform characters, and on a cartouche in the Egyptian form. Until this date it therefore appears that ships sailed up the Pelusiac branch of the Nile to Bubastis, and thence along the canal to Heroopolis, where the cargoes were transhipped to the Red Sea.
They crossed the Lake Mareotis, glided along one of the minor outlets of the delta until they reached the Bolbitinic branch of the Nile, then, by canals and natural water-courses, worked their way across to Bubastis, and thence straight down the Pelusiac Nile to Pelusium.
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