Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/347

NEKOS.- HIS CANAL. -HIS NAVY. 33] Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadnezzar (B. c. G25-5C1) that the Chaldteans or Assyrians of Babylon appear at the maximum of their power and aggressive disposition, while the Assyrians of Ninus or Nineveh lose their substantive position through the taking of that town by Kyaxares (about B. c. GOO), the great- est height which the Median power ever reached. Between the Egyptian NekOs and his grandson Aprifis Pharaoh Necho ami Pharaoh Ilophra of the Old Testament on the one side, and the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar on the other, Judaea and Phe- nicia form the intermediate subject of quarrel : and the political independence of the Phenician towns is extinguished never again to be recovered. At the commencement of his reign, it appears, Nekos was chiefly anxious to extend the Egyptian com- merce, for which purpose he undertook two measures, both of astonishing boldness for that age, a canal between the lower part of the eastern or Pelusiac Nile, and the inmost corner of the Red sea, and the circumnavigation of Africa ; his great ob- ject being to procure a water-communication between the Medi- terranean and the Red sea. He began the canal much about the same time as Nebuchadnezzar executed his canal from Bab- ylon to Teredon with such reckless determination, that one hundred and twenty thousand Egyptians are said to have perished in the work ; but either from this disastrous proof of the difficul- ty, or, as Herodotus represents, from the terrors of a menacing prophecy which reached him, he was compelled to desist. Next, he accomplished the circumnavigation of Africa, already above alluded to ; but in this way too he found it impracticable to pro- cure any available communication such as he wished. 1 It is plain that in both these enterprises he was acting under Phenician and Greek instigation ; and we may remark that the point of the Nile from whence the canal took its departure, was close upon the mercenary camps or stratopeda. Being unable to connect the two seas together, he built and equipped an armed naval force both upon the one and the other, and entered upon aggres- sive enterprises, naval as well as military. His army, on march- 1 Hcrodot. ii, 158. Respecting the canal of Nekos, see the explanation of Mr. Kenrick on this chapter of Herodotus. From Bubastis to Suez the length would bt about ninety miles.