Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

The extension of the cultivated soil of Egypt was only a secondary object in the construction of this Canal. Its main object was to strengthen that side of Egypt which was exposed to invasion from the dreaded and hated Hyksos. One of the greatest works of the great Rameses was the covering the whole of Egypt with a network of waterways in connexion with the river. These Canals, or wet-ditches had a double purpose. They would greatly extend the supply of water, in exact proportion to which was the capacity of Egypt for supporting life; and they would also have an invaluable defensive utility, for they would render it impossible for a mounted army, such as that of their north-eastern neighbours would be, to overrun the country. This Canal, then, branching off from the Nile at Bubastis, and running out for sixty miles into the desert, with the strong cities of Pithom and Ramses upon it, would be the first check to an invading army, which would have either to turn the Canal, or to sit down in the desert before those cities. The history, therefore, of the canalization of the desert begins with a work, the first object of which was national defence, and which also greatly promoted the (in its case) secondary object of national extension. To create a means of communication between the two seas is not a purpose we are under any necessity for ascribing to the designers of this first Canal.

We have spoken of Rameses as its constructor, and the reasons for assigning it to him are amply sufficient, still it may be as well to remember that it might have dated far back beyond his time. The Egyptians had been great then for more than a thousand years in Canal making. This implies familiarity with the art of taking levels, and with other branches of hydraulic engineering. The Bahr Jusuf Canal, which ran parallel to the river throughout almost the whole of the valley of Egypt, and was many times as great a work as this Pithom-Ramses Canal, had been constructed at so remote a time that all tradition of its date and construction had been lost. Amenemha, under the old primæval monarchy, had carried out enormous hydraulic works in the Faioum; and Menes, the first human name in Egyptian history, had been great in this department of engineering; for he had, at Memphis, given a new channel to the Nile itself. There would, therefore, have been no difficulty whatever in this particular Canal we are now speaking of having been constructed many ages before the time of the great Rameses; and the district through which it passed was one to which attention must have been directed from very early days, both for the purpose of strengthening it against any sudden inroad, and because it was the necessary base of operations in all Egyptian invasions of Asia. It is, however, easy to wander about in the region of possibilities; what we know with certainty is that this Canal existed in the time of Rameses, that he fortified it, and that he had the credit of having constructed it.

There is no evidence that he seriously entertained the project of connecting the Nile with the Red Sea by the prolongation of the Canal. Some such idea must have occurred to so sagacious a people as the Egyptians of that day, and they would have found no difficulty in carrying it out. They made, however, no attempt of the kind. The reason is on the surface. Defence was what people were then thinking about, and a through water-way would only have been making a road for their enemies; and it would have been one, of which Arabs, as they have always shown a certain kind of aptitude for maritime affairs, and as the inlet to it might have been easily reached by sea, would not have been slow in availing themselves. There can be no reasonable doubt that there was, at that date, a great deal of commerce, on the Indian Ocean, and, therefore, on the Red Sea; indeed, we may be pretty sure that the annual number of clearances in and out of Aden in the time of Rameses would not be looked upon as insignificant at the present day.

Perhaps also the reason given by Aristotle had some weight. It was known that the level of the Red Sea was higher than that of the Bitter Lakes; the influx, therefore, of the salt water, which might take place through the Canal, if it were extended to the sea, might, it was feared, overwhelm a great deal of land which had lately been brought into cultivation by aid of the fresh water of the Canal from Bubastis.

The date of the first Canal, supposing it to be no earlier than the time of Rameses, was the fourteenth century before our era. It was still in use in the time of Herodotus, being then about one thousand years old. Necho, who planned and carried out the expedition that circumnavigated Africa, and who of all the Pharaohs was the one most disposed to maritime enterprise, was naturally inclined to the idea of connecting the Red Sea and the Mediterranean by some system of internal navigation. But whatever his designs were, he does not appear to have gone further in their execution than the extension of the Canal of Rameses, which had then been in existence at least seven hundred and fifty years, as far as the Bitter Lakes. Herodotus was informed that he abandoned the enterprise on having been told by an oracle that he was working for the barbarians.

Darius, in the time of the Persian occupation of Egypt, carried out the grand idea to its completion, by extending the work of Rameses and Necho to the Red Sea. As there had, all along, been an apprehension of the effect upon cultivation of admitting into the land the salt water, we find, as we might have anticipated, that it was not allowed a passage into the Bitter Lakes, but was kept back by a lock. The connexion of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean by an unbroken water-way was now complete. A vessel might leave the Red Sea at the modern Suez, or somewhere in that neighbourhood, and enter the Mediterranean at the Pelusiac mouth of the Nile. This through communication was in actual use in the time of Herodotus. Darius’s completion of the work followed Necho’s extension at an interval of about a century.

The ensuing century and a half was a period of troubles and decadence. We are, therefore, not surprised to hear that when Alexander the Great entered Egypt, he found the Canal no longer open. A larger expenditure may have been required to keep up the banks, and to dredge out the sand that was always drifting into the channel, than could have been commanded in such times; and so it had been neglected and had become impassable.

Another century elapses; order and prosperity have been restored to Egypt; and Ptolemy Philadelphus re-opens the connexion of the Bitter Lakes and the Red Sea. He did not clear out the old Canal of Darius which had been blocked up, and abandoned, but cut a fresh one. He had it constructed of sufficient width and depth to allow ships of war to pass from the Sea to the Lakes, intending to carry it through, on the same scale, to the Mediterranean. But this magnificent project had to wait two thousand years for its realization. It is, however, possible that Ptolemy did not contemplate the direct route. If his war-vessels could have found water enough in the Bubastic branch, he would of course have contented himself with enlarging, and deepening the Bubastic Canal. We are told that his design was that of a Canal 100 feet in breadth, and 40 feet in depth. The latter appears incredible, because unnecessary. He built Arsinöe, the modern Suez, at the Red Sea terminus of his Canal, at which he constructed locks to exclude the salt water, and retain the fresh.

There was also a second Canal from the Nile to the neighbourhood of Lake Timsah in the mid-desert. It was known by the name of the Emperor Trajan. It left the river at Babylon—possibly the Babylon from which the first Epistle of St. Peter is dated—a few miles to the south of the site of modern Cairo. It thus received its supply of water from a higher level than the Canal of Rameses. It watered a new district in its passage through the desert.