The First Suez Canal?

While studying aerial photographs of the Nile Delta after their country's 1967 conquest of the Sinai, Israeli geologists noticed soil markings that were clearly vestiges of two dried-up waterways. One was quickly identified as a silted offshoot of the Nile River called the Pelusiac branch (after the ancient city of Pelusium at its mouth). The nature of the other waterway baffled the geologists until they visited the area and found man-made embankments. With that, they realized that these old mounds marked the route of a remarkable ancient canal that predated the Suez Canal by as many as 4,000 years.*

From its Mediterranean terminus at Pelusium, the so-called Eastern Canal probably headed south for ten miles, veered across what is now the Suez Canal near the town of Qantara, and approached Lake Timsah near Ismailia, where old canal remnants have previously been found. Though wind, sand and irrigation works have wiped out much of the canal's course, Geologists Amihai Sneh, Tuvia Weissbrod and Itamar Perath hint at an intriguing possibility: the waterway may have split in two, one branch following a great east-west depression called Wadi Tumilat to link with the Nile, the other continuing south into the Red Sea along a route that became part of a canal system later built by the Persian conqueror Darius.

The old waterway probably ranged in depth from 7 ft. to 10 ft., adequate for ancient barges, but the embankments were 200 ft. apart, much wider than necessary for the water traffic of that day. The Israeli scientists think they know why. Writing in American Scientist, they point out that a wide channel would have made it an effective barrier against invaders from the east, a constant threat to ancient Egypt. In addition, it would have provided essential irrigation water. Could the ancient Egyptians have built such a great canal? Yes, say the geologists. After all, hundreds of years earlier the Egyptians had already tackled another project of comparable magnitude: the construction of their first pyramids.

* A date based on references in old chronicles.

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