Geography

​Above Momemphis are two nitre-mines containing a very large amount of nitre, and the Nitriote nome. Sarapis is worshiped there, and among them alone in Egypt is a sheep sacrificed. Near here is also a city of Menelaus; and on the left in the Delta, on the river, is Naucratis, while Sais lies at a distance of two schoeni from the river, and slightly above Sais is the asylum of Osiris, in which they say Osiris lies buried. But many dispute this, and especially those who inhabit Philae above Syene and Elephantine. For they tell a myth that Isis placed tombs of Osiris in many places in the earth (only one of these actually contained Osiris, being invisible to all), and that she did this wishing to escape the notice of Typhon, lest he should come and cast the body out of the tomb.

​This is the description from Alexandria to the vertex of the Delta. Artemidorus says that the voyage up is twenty-eight schoeni, and that this is eight hundred and forty stadia, calculating the schoenus at thirty stadia; however, when we were sailing, they gave us the distances using different measures for the schoenus at different times, so that distances of forty stadia and even larger were agreed upon by them in some places. And Artemidorus himself in the following passages shows that the measure of the schoenus is variable among the Egyptians. For he says that from Memphis to the Thebaid each schoenus is one hundred and twenty stadia, and from the Thebaid to Syene sixty, and for those sailing up from Pelusium to the same vertex he says it is twenty-five schoeni, or seven hundred and fifty stadia, using the same measure. And he says that the first canal for those advancing from Pelusium is the one which fills the lakes called those by the marshes, which are two in number and lie to the left of the great river above Pelusium in Arabia; and he speaks of other lakes and canals in the same parts outside the Delta. There is also the Sethroite nome by the other lake; and he numbers this too as one of the ten nomes in the Delta; and two other canals also join the same lakes.

​And there is another canal which empties into the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf near the city of Arsinoe, which some call Cleopatris. It flows also through the so-called Bitter Lakes, which formerly were bitter, but when the aforementioned canal was cut, they were changed by the mixture of the river water, and now they are rich in fish and full of lake birds. The canal was cut at first by Sesostris before the Trojan War, or, as some say, by the son of Psammitichus, who only began it and then died, and later by Darius the First, who succeeded to the work next. He too, however, persuaded by a false opinion, abandoned the work when it was already near completion; for he was persuaded that the Red Sea was higher than Egypt, and that if the whole intervening isthmus were cut through, Egypt would be inundated by the sea. The Ptolemaic kings, however, cut through it and made the strait closed, so that when they wished they could sail out without hindrance into the outer sea and sail in again. And the question of the surface level of the waters has also been discussed in the first books of these commentaries.