Under the direction of several pharaohs, the canal connecting the Nile River to the Red Sea was established and existed until the 8th century.
The Suez Canal may be a modern engineering marvel, but waterways allowing ships to navigate have been dug since ancient times, even traversing the deserts of North Africa. The Suez Canal is the most recent of several artificial waterways running through Egypt. Constructed under the direction of various Egyptian pharaohs across different periods, they connected the Red Sea with the Nile River, rather than the Mediterranean Sea as in the modern version, according to Amusing Planet.
Location of the pharaohs’ canal. (Image: World Maps Online).
According to Aristotle, the first effort to construct a canal connecting the Red Sea and the Nile came from the legendary Egyptian Pharaoh Sesostris. Aristotle also recorded that the construction of the canal was halted when the pharaoh discovered that the sea level was higher than the land. He feared that linking the Nile with the Red Sea would allow salty seawater to flow back into the river, jeopardizing Egypt’s most vital water source.
According to Greek historians Strabo and Diodorus Siculus, after Sesostris, the canal construction continued under Necho II at the end of the 6th century BC, but he did not live to see the canal completed. Following him, Darius the Great took over Necho II’s project. However, like Sesostris, he halted construction near the Red Sea after learning that the Red Sea was higher and would flood the land if the canal were opened. Ultimately, Ptolemy II completed the canal connecting the Nile and the Red Sea. Strabo reports that the canal was nearly 50 meters wide and deep enough for large ships to navigate. The construction began at the village of Phacusa, ran across Bitter Lake, and emptied into the Persian Gulf near the city of Cleopatris.
However, historian Herodotus states that the canal was completed by Darius and was wide enough for two three-decked warships to row against each other. Before Darius, a natural waterway may have existed between Bitter Lake and the Red Sea but was blocked by silt. Darius mobilized a massive army of slaves to clear the silt so that the waterway could function again. He was so pleased with the results that he had inscriptions describing his achievement carved into pink granite.
In the late 19th century, researchers discovered a tablet named “The Pithom Stone”, which provided evidence that Ptolemy had built a harbor with a lock at the Heroopolite Gulf of the Red Sea, allowing ships to pass while preventing seawater from mixing with freshwater in the canal.
The canal existed until the 8th century when it was blocked by King al-Mansur of the Abbasid Empire in 767 to prevent enemies and rebels from using the canal to transport troops and supplies from Egypt to Arabia. Due to a lack of maintenance, the canal gradually narrowed and disappeared into the desert.
The canal was rediscovered by Napoleon in 1798 during a French campaign in Egypt and Syria. Napoleon was motivated to search for the canal because if it could be reconstructed, it would allow France to monopolize trade with India. With this design, Napoleon instructed civil engineer Jacques-Marie Le Pére to survey the terrain of the Suez isthmus while searching for the remnants of the ancient canal.
Le Pére and his colleagues eventually traced the route of the “Canal of the Pharaohs” from the Red Sea to the Nile. Later, when Napoleon became emperor, he asked the chief engineer to find a way to reopen the canal, but like the pharaohs 2,000 years earlier, he was informed that the Red Sea was higher than the Mediterranean and that a lock would need to be built to prevent a catastrophic influx of seawater. It wasn’t until 50 years later, in 1859, that the construction of the Suez Canal finally began.
