What was the Suez Canal in the era of the pharaohs, and which of the French implemented Napoleon's idea

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Suez Canal, opened to shipping in 1869, proved to be very costly and very profitable. In addition, it was a breakthrough in sea traffic - it was no longer necessary to go around Africa, as Vasco da Gama did, to get into the Mediterranean waters from the Indian Ocean. Why hasn't the new waterway been laid earlier? Perhaps because in the past, people were more concerned with preserving the environment.

Pharaonic channel

The operation of the Suez Canal brings Egypt billions of dollars annually, and this cash flow, of course, overshadows many of the disadvantages of the very existence of this transport route. But the side effects of the creation of a man-made channel between the two seas came to the minds of the ancient pharaohs, or at least their advisers; perhaps this was the reason that for most of its history the canal was abandoned and covered with sand, briefly returning to life under individual rulers.

Back in the 19th century BC, according to other sources - six hundred years later, the first work began to connect the Gulf of Suez of the Red Sea and one of the branches of the Nile Delta. Perhaps the canal was opened and ships passed through it, however, a number of historians believe that the construction was never completed before the new era. Aristotle, and after him Strabo, wrote that the sea level allegedly turned out to be higher than the water level in the Nile, and therefore, in order to prevent salt water from entering the river, the work was stopped.

According to another version, the history of the Pharaonic Canal, as this ancient hydraulic structure is now called, knew periods of active use and periods of abandonment, when the channel of the channel was covered with sand for many centuries. King Darius I also returned to the renewal of the idea of uniting the Nile and the Red Sea after Egypt was captured by the Persians. After the canal fell into disrepair again, it was cleared by Ptolemy II Philadelphus and - already in the 2nd century AD - by the Roman emperor Trajan.

In 642, the "Trajan River" was restored by the next conquerors of the Egyptian lands, the Arabs, who, however, filled the canal in 767 for economic reasons. For more than a thousand years, this prototype of the Suez Canal was forgotten, and Napoleon Bonaparte renewed the idea of a water connection between the Mediterranean and the Red Seas.

Napoleon's project and the "Suez Canal Company"

Napoleon did not become the one who built the Suez Canal, although he nevertheless approached the issue. In 1798, he assembled a commission that worked on the issue for two years - and made the mistake of discovering a height difference between the Mediterranean and Red Seas of almost ten meters that does not exist in reality. Engineers proposed a system of locks - but Napoleon had already said goodbye to the idea of colonizing Egypt, and the project itself looked too complicated and costly, and was abandoned for several decades.

Further study of Egypt revealed the researchers' mistake - it turned out that there are no elevation differences in reality. Among those who were inspired by the idea of building a canal were not only engineers, but also politicians. Not surprisingly, the route from Asia to Europe would thus be reduced by eight thousand kilometers. The project of creating an "artificial Bosphorus" began to be developed in the late 1840s, and in 1855 the Suez Canal Company was created to raise funds for the construction of the canal and ensure its subsequent functioning.

The founder of the company and the organizer of the construction was the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, who later participated in the creation of the Panama Canal, which ended with the Panama scandal: in the second large enterprise of the Frenchman, serious abuse of depositors' funds was revealed. And during the Egyptian project, the spending of the corporation's funds often turned out to be "inappropriate" - a huge amount of money was spent on bribing officials, bribing representatives of the Ottoman sultan, and paying for lobbying the company's interests in the government.

The French owned most of the shares of the corporation, the Egyptian government - a smaller one, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire allocated huge funds for the construction of the canal. The total budget exceeded half a billion francs. But the undertaking was costly not only financially: working under the scorching sun in the desert claimed a huge number of workers' lives. To solve the problem of water supply, by 1863 they dug another, small canal, parallel to the main one. About two meters deep, and about eight wide along the bottom, it brought the waters of the Nile - later they were used by residents of settlements that arose near the Suez Canal.

As a result of the work carried out, Port Said on the Mediterranean Sea and the Bitter Lakes, which had dried up a long time ago and now re-filled with water, were connected. The southern section, leading to the port of Suez on the Red Sea, partly coincided with the channel of the ancient Pharaonic Canal. The Suez Canal was 160 kilometers long and 12-13 meters deep (later the canal was deepened to 20 meters). The width across the mirror of the water reached 350 meters.

New transport artery

The opening of the Suez Canal was a big event. In Egypt, not yet spoiled by the attention of Europeans, many high-ranking visitors came to the festivities timed to coincide with the launch of a new route between the waters of the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Among them were the wife of Napoleon III, Empress Eugenia, and the emperor of Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph I, as well as members of the royal families of Prussia, Holland and other European powers.

The Egyptian authorities started a multi-day action, but not everything was realized. A serious disappointment was the postponement of the premiere of the opera Aida, which was commissioned specifically for the opening day of the Suez Canal: Giuseppe Verdi did not have time to finish the work on time. The first screening of "Aida" at the Cairo Opera House took place two years later and became a separate cultural event.

The first ship to open traffic on the Suez Canal was the yacht "Al-Mahrusa", which took part in the launch of the second Suez Canal almost a century and a half later. On August 6, 2015, a new channel was opened. Along part of the route, the existing Suez Canal was deepened and widened, and 72 kilometers of the channel were dug parallel to the existing one. The movement of ships became possible simultaneously in both directions. As a result, the capacity of the entire route has increased, and the waiting time for passage through the canal has decreased.

The Grand Suez Canal, shortly after its opening in 1869, fell into the possession of the British and French: the Egyptian authorities were forced to sell their stake in the enterprise in order to solve debt problems. Until 1956, the channel was effectively controlled by Great Britain; after it was nationalized by the Egyptian government and since then has been one of the main sources of income in the national budget.

But behind the impressive cash flow and the undoubted convenience of this route for navigation and international trade, the voice of ecologists remains practically inaudible, who assure that this large-scale construction has already irreversibly changed the flora and fauna of the two seas, and over time the situation will only get worse.

Despite the fact that a section with very salty water - Bitter Lakes - has become part of the canal, quite a large number of organisms have penetrated from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean as a result of migration. Interspecies competition has reduced, for example, the number of red mullet fish in Mediterranean waters. The opening of the Suez Canal, and then its second part, led to a change in water temperature and salinity. With the end of the pandemic restrictions, it is planned to re-raise the issue of protecting the ecology of the Red and Mediterranean Seas in connection with the operation of the canal, as well as draw conclusions for new projects, for example, an additional strait between the Marmara and the Black Seas.

And the idea for the famous opera by Verdi was once invented by Auguste Mariet, the Frenchman who dug up the Great Sphinx and saved Egypt.