constructed in that era. The Mahmoudiyah Canal Around 1818, Muhammad Ali conceived the idea of digging a canal that would allow the barges bringing cargoes from Upper, Middle and Lower Egypt to reach Alexandria without passing Rosetta and the mouth of the river, a point where many ships sank due to the turbulence of the waters. He chose a Turkish engineer, Shakir Effendi, to be in charge of the design and execution of the work. The canal would begin in the village of Atfa, below Fuwwa; would be a little over long. Shakir Effendi seems to have bungled his assignment, and was replaced by the French engineer Pascal Coste (1787–1879) who completed the canal in a record time of few months in 1820. This canal, which linked the Nile with the city's western harbor, gave Alexandria access to the Egyptian heartland and put Egypt face to face with the sea. It also provided Alexandria with Nile's fresh water for the first time in history. It should be mentioned here however that the entire canal was constructed using the hated corvée system, which Muhammad Ali and his successors used extensively and which was finally abolished under Khedive Ismail during the digging of the Suez Canal. Corvée of more than 300,000 men were drafted from every part of Egypt to dig the Mahmoudiya canal, which was of very little importance to cultivation, and which was especially designed for the benefit of the city of Alexandria. The Delta Barrages With the great expansion of commercial cotton and sugarcane cultivation, river banks were initially raised and strengthened to protect summer crops from flood water. In the Nile Delta old canals were deepened and small weirs built across them to raise the water level. But this was an enormous undertaking, and since the canals were badly laid out and graded they became full of mud during flood season and required to be continually re-excavated. Muhammad Ali Pasha was then advised to raise the water surface by erecting a dam (or, as the French called it, a barrage) across the apex of the Nile Delta, north of Cairo. In 1843 the foundations were laid for the two great barrages across the Rosetta and Damietta branches of the Nile at the point where they divide north of Cairo. The project engineer was the French engineer Mougel Bey, whose objective was to regulate the entire hydraulic system of