Kanôpos, from which the arm of the river took its name, was a small but wealthy city. It was called in Egyptian Peguath, sometimes also Kah-n-Nub, “the soil of gold” from the yellow sand on which it was built, though Greek vanity believed that this name had been given to it from Kanôbos, the pilot of Menelaos, whose tomb was of course discovered there. In later days, when Alexandria had absorbed its commerce and industry, it became, along with the outlying Zephyrion, a fashionable Alexandrine suburb. It was filled with drinking-shops and chapels, to which the pleasure-loving crowds of Alexandria used to make their way by the canal that united the two cities. The sick came also to seek healing in the temple of Serapis, or to ask the god to tell them the means of cure. The rich, too, had their villas close to the shrine of Aphroditê Arsinoê, on the breezy promontory of Zephyrion, while the rocks on the shore were cut into luxuriously-fitted baths for those who wished to bathe in the sea. The site of Zephyrion is now occupied by the little village of Abukîr, memorable in the annals of England and France. In 1891 Daninos Pasha made some excavations there which brought to light a few scanty remains of the temple of Aphroditê. The foundations of its walls were found, as well as two limestone sphinxes inscribed with the name of Amon-em-hat IV., and three great statues of red granite, one of them upright, the others seated. The upright figure was that of Ramses II. with a roll of papyrus in his hand; while the other two were female, one of them being a representation of Hont-mâ-Ra, the Pharaoh’s wife. The sphinxes and statues must have been brought from some older building to decorate the shrine of the Alexandrine goddess, and their discoverer believes that the figure of Ramses II. is older even than the age of that monarch, who has usurped it, and that it goes back to the epoch of the twelfth dynasty. Other relics of the temple—fragments of red granite from some gigantic naos, portions of statues, broken sphinxes, and a colossal human foot—strew the rocks at the foot of the promontory whereon Zephyrion stood and bear witness to the intensity of Christian zeal when paganism was abolished in Egypt. The Kanôpic arm of the Nile has long since been filled up, and the _fellah_ ploughs his field or the water-fowl congregate in the stagnant marsh where Greek trading ships once sailed. But a large part of the marsh is now in process of being reclaimed, and the engineers who have been draining and washing it have come across many traces of the ancient Kanôpos. It lay to the east of Zephyrion, between the shore and the marshy lake.