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The Suez Canal (Arabic: قناة السويس Qanāt al-Sūwais) is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Opened in November 1869 after 10 years of construction work, it allows transportation by water between Europe and Asia without navigation around Africa. The northern terminus is Port Said and the southern terminus is Port Tawfiq at the city of Suez. Ismailia lies on its west bank, 3 km (1.9 mi) from the half-way point.[1]
When first built, the canal was 164 km (102 mi) long and 8 m (26 ft) deep. After multiple enlargements, the canal is 193.30 km (120.11 mi) long, 24 m (79 ft) deep and 205 metres (673 ft) wide as of 2010.[2] It consists of the northern access channel of 22 km (14 mi), the canal itself of 162.25 km (100.82 mi) and the southern access channel of 9 km (5.6 mi).[3]
The canal is single lane with passing places in the "Ballah By-Pass" and the Great Bitter Lake.[4] It contains no locks; seawater flows freely through the canal. In general, the canal north of the Bitter Lakes flows north in winter and south in summer. The current south of the lakes changes with the tide at Suez.[5]
The canal is owned and maintained by the Suez Canal Authority[6] (SCA) of Egypt. Under international treaty, it may be used "in time of war as in time of peace, by every vessel of commerce or of war, without distinction of flag."[7]
History
Nile–Red Sea Canal(s)
Main article: Canal of the Pharaohs
Ancient west–east canals have facilitated travel from the Nile to the Red Sea.[8][9][10] One smaller canal is believed to have been constructed under the auspices of either Senusret II[11] or Ramesses II.[8][9][10] Another canal probably incorporating a portion of the first[8][9] was constructed under the reign of Necho II and completed by Darius.[8][9][10]
2nd millennium BC
The legendary Sesostris (likely either Pharaoh Senusret II or Senusret III of the Twelfth dynasty of Egypt[11][12]) is suggested to have perhaps started work on an ancient canal joining the River Nile with the Red Sea (1897 BC–1839 BC). (It is said that in ancient times the Red Sea reached northward to the Bitter Lakes[8][9] and Lake Timsah.[13][14])
In his Meteorology, Aristotle wrote:
One of their kings tried to make a canal to it (for it would have been of no little advantage to them for the whole region to have become navigable; Sesostris is said to have been the first of the ancient kings to try), but he found that the sea was higher than the land. So he first, and Darius afterwards, stopped making the canal, lest the sea should mix with the river water and spoil it.[15]
Strabo also wrote that Sesostris started to build a canal, and Pliny the Elder wrote:
165. Next comes the Tyro tribe and, on the Red Sea, the harbour of the Daneoi, from which Sesostris, king of Egypt, intended to carry a ship-canal to where the Nile flows into what is known as the Delta; this is a distance of over 60 miles. Later the Persian king Darius had the same idea, and yet again Ptolemy II, who made a trench 100 feet wide, 30 feet deep and about 35 miles long, as far as the Bitter Lakes.[16]
French cartographers discovered the remnants of an ancient north–south canal running past the east side of Lake Timsah and ending near the north end of the Great Bitter Lake in the second half of the 19th century.[17] This proved to be the celebrated canal by the Persian king Darius I when his stele commemorating its construction was serendipitously found at the site! (This ancient, second, canal may have followed a course along the shoreline of the Red Sea when it once extended north to Lake Timsah.[14][17]) In the 20th century the northward extension of this ancient canal was discovered, extending from Lake Timsah to the Ballah Lakes,[18] which was subsequently dated to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt by extrapolating the dates of ancient sites erected along its course.[18]
The reliefs of the Punt expedition under Hatshepsut 1470 BC depict seagoing vessels carrying the expeditionary force returning from Punt. This has given rise to the suggestion that, at the time, a navigable link existed between the Red Sea and the Nile.[19][20] Evidence seems to indicate its existence by the 13th century BC during the time of Ramesses II.[8][21][22][23]
Canals dug by Necho, Darius I and Ptolemy
Remnants of an ancient west–east canal, running through the ancient Egyptian cities of Bubastis, Pi-Ramesses, and Pithom were discovered by Napoleon Bonaparte and his cadre of engineers and cartographers in 1799.[9][24][25][26][27]
According to the Histories of the Greek historian Herodotus,[28] about 600 BC, Necho II undertook to dig a west–east canal through the Wadi Tumilat between Bubastis and Heroopolis,[9] and perhaps continued it to the Heroopolite Gulf and the Red Sea.[8] Regardless, Necho is reported as having never completed his project.[8][9]
Herodotus was told that 120,000 men perished in this undertaking, but this figure is doubtlessly exaggerated.[29] According to Pliny the Elder, Necho's extension to the canal was approximately 57 English miles,[9] equal to the total distance between Bubastis and the Great Bitter Lake, allowing for winding through valleys that it had to pass through.[9] The length that Herodotus tells us, of over 1000 stadia (i.e., over 114 miles), must be understood to include the entire distance between the Nile and the Red Sea[9] at that time.
With Necho's death, work was discontinued. Herodotus tells us that the reason the project was abandoned was because of a warning received from an oracle that others would benefit by its successful completion.[9][30] In fact, Necho's war with Nebuchadnezzar II most probably prevented the canal's continuation.
Necho's project was finally completed by Darius I of Persia, who conquered Ancient Egypt. We are told that by Darius's time a natural[9] waterway passage which had existed[8] between the Heroopolite Gulf and the Red Sea[31] in the vicinity of the Egyptian town of Shaluf[9] (alt. Chalouf[32] or Shaloof[14]), located just south of the Great Bitter Lake,[9][14] had become so blocked[8] with silt[9] that Darius needed to clear it out so as to allow navigation[9] once again. According to Herodotus, Darius's canal was wide enough that two triremes could pass each other with oars extended, and required four days to traverse. Darius commemorated his achievement with a number of granite stelae that he set up on the Nile bank, including one near Kabret, and a further one a few miles north of Suez. The Darius Inscriptions read:[33]
Saith King Darius: I am a Persian. Setting out from Persia, I conquered Egypt. I ordered this canal dug from the river called the Nile that flows in Egypt, to the sea that begins in Persia. When the canal had been dug as I ordered, ships went from Egypt through this canal to Persia, even as I intended.—Darius Inscription
The canal left the Nile at Bubastis. An inscription on a pillar at Pithom records that in 270 or 269 BC it was again reopened, by Ptolemy II Philadelphus.[34] In Arsinoe,[9] Ptolemy constructed a navigable lock, with sluices, at the Heroopolite Gulf of the Red Sea[31] which allowed the passage of vessels but prevented salt water from the Red Sea from mingling with the fresh water in the canal.[9]
Receding Red Sea and the dwindling Nile
The Red Sea is believed by some historians to have gradually receded over the centuries, its coastline slowly moving farther and farther southward away from Lake Timsah[13][14] and the Great Bitter Lake[8][9] to its present coastline today. Coupled with persistent accumulations of Nile silt, maintenance and repair of Ptolemy's canal became increasingly cumbersome over each passing century.
Two hundred years after the construction of Ptolemy's canal, Cleopatra seems to have had no west–east waterway passage,[8][9] because the Pelusiac branch of the Nile River, which had fed Ptolemy's west–east canal, had by that time dwindled, being choked with silt.[8][9]
Old Cairo to the Red Sea
By the 8th century, a navigable canal existed between Old Cairo and the Red Sea,[8][9] but accounts vary as to who ordered its construction—either Trajan or 'Amr ibn al-'As, or Omar the Great.[8][9] This canal reportedly linked to the River Nile at Old Cairo[9] and ended near modern Suez.[8][35] A geography treatise by Dicuil reports a conversation with an English monk, Fidelis, who had sailed on the canal from the Nile to the Red Sea during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the first half of the 8th century [36]
The Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur is said to have ordered this canal closed in 767 to prevent supplies from reaching Arabian detractors.[8][9]
Repair by Tāriqu l-Ḥākim
Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah is claimed to have repaired the Old Cairo to Red Sea passageway,[8][9] but only briefly, circa 1000 AD,[8][9] as it soon "became choked with sand."[9] However, we are told that parts of this canal still continued to fill in during the Nile's annual inundations.[8][9]
Napoleon discovers an ancient canal
Napoleon Bonaparte's interest in finding the remnants of an ancient waterway passage[37] culminated in a cadre of archaeologists, scientists, cartographers and engineers scouring the area beginning in the latter months of 1798.[38] Their findings, recorded in the Description de l'Égypte, include detailed maps that depict the discovery of an ancient canal extending northward from the Red Sea and then westward toward the Nile.[37][39]
Napoleon had contemplated the construction of another, modern, north–south canal to join the Mediterranean and Red Sea. But his project was abandoned after the preliminary survey erroneously concluded that the Red Sea was 10 metres (33 ft) higher than the Mediterranean, making a locks-based canal too expensive and very long to construct. The Napoleonic survey commission's error came from fragmented readings mostly done during wartime, which resulted in imprecise calculations.[40] Though by this time unnavigable,[9] the ancient route from Bubastis to the Red Sea still channeled water in spots as late as 1861[9] and as far east as Kassassin.
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