remains of three dredging boats have been unearthed; they were abandoned at the bottom of the harbour during the first and second centuries AD. The Banu Musa Brothers during the Muslim Golden Age in while working at the Bayt-Al-Hikmah (house of wisdom) in Baghdad, designed an original invention in their book named ‘book of ingenious devices’ A grab machine that that does not appear in any earlier Greek works. The grab they described was used to extract objects from underwater, and recover objects from the beds of streams. During the renaissance Leonardo da Vinci drew a design for a drag dredger. Dredging machines have been used during the construction of the Suez Canal from the late 1800s to present day expansions and maintenance. The completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, the most expensive U.S. engineering project at the time, relied extensively on dredging. Purposes Capital dredging: dredging carried out to create a new harbour, berth or waterway, or to deepen existing facilities in order to allow larger ships access. Because capital works usually involve hard material or high-volume works, the work is usually done using a cutter suction dredge or large trailing suction hopper dredge; but for rock works, drilling and blasting along with mechanical excavation may be used. Land reclamation: dredging to mine sand, clay or rock from the seabed and using it to construct new land elsewhere. This is typically performed by a cutter-suction dredge or trailing suction hopper dredge. The material may also be used for flood or erosion control. Maintenance: dredging to deepen or maintain navigable waterways or channels which are threatened to become silted with the passage of time, due to sedimented sand and mud, possibly making them too shallow for navigation. This is often carried out with a trailing suction hopper dredge. Most dredging is for this purpose, and it may also be done to maintain the holding capacity of reservoirs or lakes. Harvesting materials: dredging sediment for elements like gold, diamonds or other valuable trace substances. Hobbyists examine their dredged matter to pick out items of potential value, similar to the hobby of metal detecting. Fishing dredging is a technique for catching certain species of edible clams and crabs. In Louisiana and other American states, with salt water estuaries that can sustain bottom oyster beds, oysters are raised and harvested. A heavy rectangular metal scoop is towed astern of a moving boat