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The Suez Canal....
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The Suez Canal (Arabic, Qanā al-Suways), west of the
Sinai Peninsula, is a 163-km maritime canal in Egypt
between Port Said on the Mediterranean Sea and Suez (al-Suways) on the
Red Sea.
The canal allows two-way north-south water transport from Europe to Asia
without circumnavigating Africa. Even before the construction of the canal, some
transport was conducted by offloading ships and carrying the goods over land
between the Mediterranean and the
Red Sea. The canal comprises two parts,
north and south of the Great Bitter Lake, linking the
Mediterranean Sea to
the Gulf of Suez on the Red Sea. |
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Perhaps as early as the 12th Dynasty, Pharaoh Senusret
III may have had a west-east canal dug through the Wadi Tumilat, joining the
Nile with the Red Sea, for direct trade with Punt. Evidence nevertheless
indicates its existence at least by the 13th century BC during the time of Ramesses II. It later fell into disrepair, and according to the Histories of
the Greek historian Herodotus,
re-excavation was undertaken about 600 BCE by Necho II, though he never completed the project. The canal was finally
completed about 500 BCE by King Darius I, the Persian conqueror of
Egypt. |
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The canal was again restored by
Ptolemy II about 250 BCE.
Over the next thousand years it was successively modified, destroyed, and
rebuilt, until finally being put out of commission in the eighth century by
the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur.
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More than a thousand years elapsed before the next
attempt was made to dig a canal. At the end of the 18th century,
Napoleon
Bonaparte, while in Egypt, contemplated the construction of a canal to join
the Mediterranean and Red Seas. His project was abandoned, however, after a
French survey erroneously concluded that the waters of the
Red Sea were
higher than those of the Mediterranean, making a lockless canal impossible. |
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