This chapter gives an overview of the major hydraulic works that have been undertaken in Alexandria from its foundation to the Arab conquest. Fresh water in and around Alexandria is positioned as a historical agent around which the city’s plurisecular history wove itself. Built on a rocky substrate that, until recently, protected it from the subsidence that affected most of the northern edge of the Delta, the city stood on a locus that was rich in subterranean water. This chapters shows how for centuries, Alexandrians were careful to collect, store, and distribute this underground freshwater as a way to keep themselves alive. Concomitantly, geoarchaeological and written evidence document sustained yet at times interrupted attempts by state authorities to enhance the city’s commercial appeal and water supply by tying it to the Nile via artificially maintained canals. These canals’ histories, as well as those of the city’s known hyponomes, cisterns, and other lifting devices, allowed the Macedonian foundation to develop on a grand scale, and to survive during periods of water crisis.

This chapter explores water development in the Buhayra province (western Delta), mainly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, to examine the canal system and how it was developed. Buhayra province, an administrative prefecture in Ottoman Egypt, was located on the route that connected Alexandria to Cairo. From the early Islamic period down to the Mamluk period (1250–1517), the province had seen the development of canals for navigation and irrigation. Although Mamluk sources describe these water development works, we know less about them through the Ottoman period due to a lack of contemporary accounts. The most accessible and seemingly accurate source on the rural landscape is the Napoleonic map from Description de l’Égypte; this map, however, only reflects the landscape at the end of the eighteenth century. Such a situation makes the Ottoman period a blank space in the province’s history. This chapter aims to analyse what happened in the Ottoman period to those canals developed in the Mamluk period to understand, as sequentially as possible, how the canals and the landscape along them changed. The analysis also gives us a glimpse of the fringes of Ottoman rural administration, revealing how the canals were maintained at the time.