The greatest artificial waterway constructed up to the present time has been the Suez Canal. Longer canals have been made both in Europe and in the United States, but no canal hitherto completed has been built of the same large dimensions, nor has any other canal cost so considerable a sum of money. It is not too much to say that no other waterway has been more important to commerce, nor has any other been attended with the same momentous and permanent political consequences. It is satisfactory to be able to add that few waterways of modern times have been so successful from a financial point of view. The story of the Suez Canal has been often told. It has always, however, lacked completeness, which indeed is impossible of attainment in reference to an undertaking that is making history at the same rapid rate that this has done, and is still doing. It is remarkable that some of the earliest canals of which we have any record were constructed between Suez and the Nile during the existence of the eighteenth dynasty (about fifteen centuries before Christ). But the communication thus opened was not apparently found of much service, seeing that the canals were allowed to fill up and fall into such decay as to compel their abandonment.[138] Another canal, probably over the same route, was opened some centuries later by Pharaoh Necho, with a view to facilitating the communication between Assyria and Egypt, which was then frequent and considerable. This canal was open, and in regular use, during the reign of Darius. Ptolemy Philadelphus, finding the waterway neglected, reopened and completed it from the Pelusiæ, or Eastern Branch of the Nile, near Bubastes, to Arsinoe, on the Red Sea. This canal is stated by Strabo to have been 50 yards wide and 1000 stadia in length. The Romans, to whom this highway was known as the Trajanus Amnis, improved and widened it. At a later period the Arabs, after conquering Egypt, developed the canal for the purpose of carrying grain from Egypt to the holy cities of Mecca and Medinah, and it was so employed for a century and a quarter.