The canal built by the 12th Dynasty pharaoh Senusert II, known as the Sesostris Canal, was not the first to be dug in Egypt. The ancient Egyptians dug several other canals from prehistoric times onwards from their settlements on the banks of the Nile. They dug canals for irrigation and for trade. “Drawings of ships on pots dating from the Naqada II Period (3500-3200 BCE) highlight the kind of ships used,” Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, coordinator of archaeological sites around the new Suez Canal, told Al-Ahram Weekly. He said that the first official water canal dug under the supervision of the government had been built during the reign of the so-called “Scorpion Kings” around 3100-3000 BCE and the celebration was registered on a limestone block unearthed in Aswan in 1898 and now on display at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in the UK. The scene depicts the king holding an axe in his hand surrounded by a crowd of people. The signs of all the regions in Egypt are engraved on the block. Abdel-Maqsoud said that the ancient Egyptians used canals for military purposes, with the First Dynasty pharaoh Mena building a canal along the northern border of his capital of Memphis to protect the town from invaders, for example. “Digging canals was a very important job during the First and Second Dynasties, leading the governments of the time to create the new title of ‘supervisor of the digging of canals,'” he said. During the Old Kingdom when the construction of pyramids started in Egypt canals were dug from the Nile to the Giza Plateau in an attempt to facilitate the transportation of stone blocks from the quarries at Tora and Aswan to the construction location. During the reign of the Sixth Dynasty pharaoh Pepi I, the first major shipping canal was constructed and the rocks of the first cataract of the Nile pierced. This helped the Egyptian army to extend its hold on Nubia, from where raids had been conducted against Upper Egypt. The canal was also of economic significance, enabling the transportation of blocks of granite and obelisks downriver on sizable ships. The canal had a length of 90 metres and was ten metres wide and nine metres deep and was dug out through granite. Weni the Elder, the ruler of Upper Egypt during the reign of the pharaohs Pepi I and his son Merenre, wrote an autobiographical text that has now been translated by Egyptologist Mark Vygus. It reads: “His majesty sent me in order to dig five canals in Upper Egypt and in order to build three barges and four tow-boats of acacia wood of Wawat, the rulers of the Medja hills Irtjet, Wawat, Yam, Medja were cutting the wood for them. I did it entirely in one year, floated it and loaded it with very large granite blocks for the pyramid of Merenre. Indeed, I made a saving for the Palace with all these five canals.” During the Middle Kingdom and as agriculture in Egypt reached its peak, a large number of irrigation canals were dug. According to historians, the canals in Fayoum took up ten per cent of the town's area. According to Abdel-Maqsoud, the largest was the canal known today as Bahr Youssef, which begins at Dayrout in Assiut and heads towards Minya and Ben Youssef before it reaches Qarun Lake in Fayoum. The aim of this canal was to irrigate the land and to reduce the salinity of the lake. It was also used as a water channel linking the Fayoum to the Nile Valley. The ancient Egyptians also attempted to link the Nile to the Red Sea via several canals. Ancient historians such as Herodotus, Diodorus, Strabo and Pliny the Elder wrote that during their trips to Egypt they saw a canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea starting from the Bubastis branch of the Nile north of Zagazig and stretching east to the Tumilat Valley to the Bitter Lakes near Ismailia. At the southern side of the lakes a small canal was dug to link the main canal to the Red Sea, then known (in Greek) as the Erythra Sea. This canal was called the Sesostris Canal after the Greek name of the 12th Dynasty pharaoh Senusert. At the beginning of the 19th Dynasty, the pharaoh Seti ordered the canal re-dug after it had been filled with sand. Nacho II of the 26th Dynasty did the same, ordering vessels to sail from it on exploration trips. “However, the canal was not used for long as a religious prophecy said it would be a source of invasion from enemies and the disappearance of Nacho's kingdom,” Abdel-Maqsoud said. The canal was re-dug during the reign of the Persian king Darius I in order to facilitate ships carrying taxes taken from Egypt to the Persian capital through the Arabian Gulf. “The canal was large enough for two ships' oars to touch when they were sailing side by side,” Abdel-Maqsoud said. “We know about this canal from five reliefs that were once erected on its banks,” he added, explaining that during the excavation work in 1866 to dig the present Suez Canal, the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps unearthed one of the reliefs, which is now on display at the Suez National Museum. The relief is called the Kabrit Relief and is carved of red granite. One of its faces bears a hieroglyphic text while a second bears a cuneiform text. Alexander the Great later ordered two canals to be built linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. The first started from the Crocodile Lake and led through to the Mediterranean, and the second was from the Bitter Lakes to the Gulf of Suez. “Alexander's early death caused the projects to fall into oblivion, however,” Abdel-Maqsoud asserted. In the third century BCE, the pharaoh Ptolemy II had a further canal dug, noting on a stelae unearthed at Tel Al-Maskhouta that he had constructed a canal along the Talimat Valley. The stelae is on display in the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square in Cairo. In the Moses Springs area in the northern part of Suez a number of engraved blocks have been found revealing the activities of Ptolemy II in the area. During the Roman Period, the emperor Trajan dug a canal from the Nile north of the Fort of Babylon at Fum Al-Khalig to the Talimat Valley and then towards the east to take the path of the old canal until the Gulf of Suez. “This canal was inaugurated in 117 CE and continued to play a role in transportation for more than 300 years,” Abdel-Maqsoud said, adding that it was eventually neglected and no longer able to transport vessels. “The continuous attempts to dig a canal in this area created settlements and military fortresses in the area around it and in the areas stretching along its path,” he said. He added that during the Islamic Period the Arab conqueror of Egypt, Amr Ibn Al-As, ordered the clearance of Trajan's Canal in order to use it to connect Egypt's new capital of Fustat to the caliphal capital as well as to create a route for trade and the transport of soldiers. “The canal was renamed and enlarged and became the Amir Al-Momenin Canal,” Abdel-Maqsoud said. Ibn Al-As had wanted to dig a canal between the Crocodile Lake and the Mediterranean to link both seas, he added, but the caliph Omar Ibn Al-Khattab refused such a project, fearing that the Byzantines might invade Egypt through it. The canal at that time was 150 km in length, 25 metres wide, and four metres deep. In 767, the Abbasid caliph Abu Gaafar Al-Mansour ordered the filling of the canal with sand, closing it at Suez in order to stop help reaching Mecca and Medina during a rebellion against Abbasid rule. The canal remained one of Egypt's main landmarks, however, and travellers mentioned that its width ranged from between 15 and 30 feet and that several houses were built on its banks. Regretfully, it was filled with sand at the end of the 19th century. Several other canals were dug in different areas of Egypt during the Islamic Period. The country's governor, Abdel-Aziz Ibn Marawan, had several canals built in Helwan in 693 CE, and the historian Al-Maqrizi later wrote that during the reign of the Mameluke sultan Al-Nasser Mohamed Ibn Qalawoun a canal was dug to link the seas in 1325 CE called the Al-Nasseri Canal. During the reign of Mohamed Ali in the early part of the 19th century a large part of this was filled with sand as part of the work carried out to rehabilitate Cairo. Abdel-Maqsoud relates that when the French sent Napoleon Bonaparte to Egypt in 1798 at the head of an invasion, the idea of digging a canal linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea was again presented by French engineers, but their wrong calculations of the level of the Red Sea led to the cancellation of the project. In the earlier part of the 19th century, numerous canals were dug in Egypt, including the 80-km Al-Mahmoudiya Canal stretching from Kafr Al-Sheikh to Alexandria. There was also the Al-Ismailia Canal going from Shubra in Cairo to Suez, and the Al-Ibrahimiya Canal, dug under the khedive Ismail's rule to serve the three Upper Egyptian cities of Assiut, Minya and Beni Sueif. In 1840, Mohamed Ali ordered French engineers to draw up a canal project to link the Mediterranean to the Red Sea directly without a Nile connection. “The project lay dormant until its execution during the reign of Said Pasha by de Lesseps, when the Suez Canal finally saw the light of day,” Abdel-Maqsoud concluded, adding that now “6 August 2015 is about to add another chapter to Egypt's achievements.”
