The Suez Canal

During the time of the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt, Egyptian engineers dug a canal in the eastern Nile delta to connect the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. The canal went through periods of neglect, being rebuilt by successive generations, including the ancient Greeks and Romans. When the trade route between India and Europe around Africa was discovered, the ancient canal through Egypt was abandoned permanently.

Toward the end of the 18th century, Napoleon Bonaparte had the idea of linking the two Seas, but his engineers thought that two bodies of water were at different levels. This difference would cause difficulties as water flowed continuously from the higher sea to the lower. So the project was abandoned.

In 1854, the former French consul to Egypt and a renowned canal-builder, Ferdinand De Lesseps, had reached the end of a long career. At the age of fifty he took up the cause of building the Suez Canal. He succeeded in obtaining permission from the Viceroy of Egypt. Many people considered the project to be doomed, because they believed that the two Seas were at different levels. In 1855 an international team of engineers conducted independent measurements and concluded that the Seas were at the same level. De Lesseps proceeded to promote the idea and raise funds. The Egyptian Viceroy, an old friend of De Lesseps, had offered to provide slave labour, so the projected budget was much less than it finally cost. De Lesseps got his funding, and the work began in 1859, five years after he first received the permission.

The work was arduous and claimed over 100,000 lives. More than 1.5 million Egyptian workers took part. De Lesseps' patron died before the project was finished, and he had to get support from Napoleon, who was by now emperor of France, to convince the new Egypian viceroy to let the work continue. Finally, in November 1869, the Suez Canal officially opened.

The Suez Canal is 195 km long. The minimum bottom width of the channel is 60 m and ships of 16 m draft can make the transit. The canal can accommodate ships as large as 150,000 dead weight tons fully loaded. It has no locks, because the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Suez have roughly the same water level. The canal utilizes three bodies of water-Lake Manzilah, Lake Timsah, and the Bitter Lakes - and is not the shortest distance across the isthmus. Most of the canal is limited to a single lane of traffic, but several passing bays exist, and two-lane bypasses are located in the Bitter Lakes and between Al Qantarah and Ismailia. A railroad on the west bank runs parallel to the canal for its entire distance. Approximately 50 ships cross the canal daily