Darius the Great ordered a canal to be dug from the Nile to the Red Sea. To commemorate its completion and successful operation, he set up inscribed memorials, one of which was found in 1866 during the excavation of the modern Suez Canal.' This consisted of a granite stele, located near the thirty-third kilometer-stone from Suez, twelve kilometers north of Shaluf; hence it is called the Stele of Shaluf. This stele was at least 3 meters high, 2.30 meters wide, and 78 centimeters in thickness. On one side it bore a framed design with a curved top: at the top, the winged sun-disk; below this, two standing figures wearing crowns, facing each other, with two cartouches between them bearing the name of Darius in the Old Persian syllabary; to the right of the figures, a six-line OP inscription with the name and titles of Darius, and to the left, in seven lines, the Elamite and the Akkadian versions of the same, in four and three lines, respectively. Beneath stood a longer inscription in OP, twelve lines in all, running the full width of the panel, which gave the record of the construction and the operation of the canal; below this, the Elamite version, of which seven lines are preserved in part, and at the bottom, presumably, the Akkadian version, now entirely lost. On the reverse side stood a longer inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphics, giving apparently a fuller account; but very little of this is now legible, for Arabs had built a fire at the base of the stele, on the side bearing the Egyptian text, and the heat had damaged the inscription on the nearer side and had caused the stele to fall apart into a considerable number of fragments. Upon receiving the news of the discovery of this monument, Mr. Charles de Lesseps, chief of the French engineers constructing the modern canal, had excavations made around the stele in order to discover additional fragments, of which ultimately eighteen were found