The greatest artificial waterway constructed up to the present time has been the Suez Canal. Longer canals have been made both in Europe and in the United States, but no canal hitherto completed has been built of the same large dimensions, nor has any other canal cost so considerable a sum of money. It is not too much to say that no other waterway has been more important to commerce, nor has any other been attended with the same momentous and permanent political consequences. It is satisfactory to be able to add that few waterways of modern times have been so successful from a financial point of view.
The story of the Suez Canal has been often told. It has always, however, lacked completeness, which indeed is impossible of attainment in reference to an undertaking that is making history at the same rapid rate that this has done, and is still doing.
It is remarkable that some of the earliest canals of which we have any record were constructed between Suez and the Nile during the existence of the eighteenth dynasty (about fifteen centuries before Christ). But the communication thus opened was not apparently found of much service, seeing that the canals were allowed to fill up and fall into such decay as to compel their abandonment.[138] Another canal, probably over the same route, was opened some centuries later by Pharaoh Necho, with a view to facilitating the communication between Assyria and Egypt, which was then frequent and considerable. This canal was open, and in regular use, during the reign of Darius.
Ptolemy Philadelphus, finding the waterway neglected, reopened and completed it from the Pelusiæ, or Eastern Branch of the Nile, near Bubastes, to Arsinoe, on the Red Sea. This canal is stated by Strabo to have been 50 yards wide and 1000 stadia in length. The Romans, to whom this highway was known as the Trajanus Amnis, improved and widened it. At a later period the Arabs, after conquering Egypt, developed the canal for the purpose of carrying grain from Egypt to the holy cities of Mecca and Medinah, and it was so employed for a century and a quarter.
It has been contended, as an argument against the Suez canal, that if it were practicable to keep open a great waterway between the two oceans, the canal which passed through so many vicissitudes would not have been allowed again and again to become obliterated, nor would cargoes have been discharged at Myos Hormos, the great port at the entrance to the Gulf of Suez, and carried overland to the Nile, a distance of some 80 miles, at a time when the canal appears to have been available, if it had been entirely satisfactory. But there are several considerations entering into the question of transport at that time that cannot be very readily appreciated now. The camel was then the ship of the desert to a much greater extent than it has been in more modern times. The knowledge of navigation was far from perfect, and the dangers of the Red Sea, which are now trifling, were then deemed so formidable that vessels discharged their cargoes in the harbour of Massowah, whence they were sent 1500 miles across the desert on the backs of camels, rather than face the Red Sea route viâ Suez, although, as the canal was then open, a vessel from the east might have made use of it and reached Alexandria or Ostia without breaking bulk. To our own times, and in the light of our fuller knowledge, this seems to be little short of incredible. Many centuries later than the time of which we write, St. Jerome, in speaking of the Red Sea, declared that mariners who had been six months at sea deemed themselves fortunate if they had traversed its full length, and reached a port of safety.[139]
The first recorded attempt at the construction of a canal was made in this very region, Neco, the son of Psammiticus, having connected the Gulf of Heroopolis with the Pelusiac branch of the Nile at Bubastis (Zigazig).[140] The narrow channel which here connected the Gulf of Heroopolis with the Red Sea, appears to have been closed by an upheaval of the soil. At the southern end of the gulf (Bitter Lakes) goods were landed and carried onward to the Red Sea. Darius subsequently dug a canal along the line of the ancient junction of the Gulf of Heroopolis with the Red Sea, as shown in the annexed sketch by the letters A A. This canal, which was also called the canal of the Pharaohs and of Trajan, is understood to have finally disappeared in the eighth century.
The Canal of Rameses.
The last attempt at a passage from the Red Sea to the Nile was made by Amru ibn el Aas, the general of the Caliph Omar, who conquered Egypt in the seventh century. A great famine reigning in Mecca, Amru was ordered to take measures for forwarding thenceforth grain from Egypt by the quickest route. “He dug a canal of communication from the Nile to the Red Sea, a distance of 80 miles, by which provisions might be conveyed to the Arabian shores. This canal had been commenced by Trajan, the Roman emperor,”[141] who, the Pelusiac arm of the Nile being no longer navigable, joined his canal to the river at Cairo, instead of Bubastis or Zigazig. This occurred in the year of the great mortality a.d. 639, and in 767 the Caliph Abou Giaffar el Mansour, to prevent food being sent to the insurgents of Medina, caused the canal to be destroyed by filling up the junction of Neco’s canal and the Bitter Lakes. The winds and the sands completed the work, and produced the ridge of Serapeum, which is believed by some to cover the site of the ancient city of Heroopolis.
The engineers of Ptolemy II. advised him not to cut a canal across the isthmus, because the land, being lower than the level of the Red Sea, would be laid under water; but that prince turned the difficulty by causing flood-gates to be erected at proper points, in order to keep back the waters of the sea at high tides, and those of the canal at low ebb, so that navigation became possible both ways. Now, this opening, in as perfect state of preservation at certain places, according to M. de Lesseps, as it was in the eighth century, really forms part, to the extent of four kilometres, near Shaloof, of the present canal, which opens into the Red Sea by means of sluices having a fall of three metres (9 feet), being the altitude of the mouth above the average level of the sea. This seems to prove that eleven centuries ago the sea was about as much higher as it is now, so that the isthmus has, indeed, experienced an upheaval. At the time that the Hebrews quitted Egypt the rock of Shaloof, the last offshoot of the Geneffay Hills, must have been entirely under water. When, by the gradual rising of the land, the top of this rock emerged from the water, it became covered with an accumulation of earthy or sandy matter, brought by wind and tide, until a barrier was formed which could only be swept over at high water. The lakes were consequently precluded from experiencing any ebb or flow. The slow upheaval of the soil continuing, the terra firma of Shaloof assumed a permanent shape, and the requirements of navigation led to the idea of cutting a canal. Herodotus speaks of it as having been open in his time: this fixes its date at 450 years b.c. It was repaired under the Ptolemies, improved during the Roman domination by a supply of water from Cairo, dredged by the Caliph Omar in the seventh century, and abandoned to decay in the eighth.