Art. XX.—Visit to the Bitter Lakes, Isthmus of Suez, by the bed of the ancient Canal of Nechos, the “Khalij al Kadim” of the Arabs, in June, 1842

Abstract

It will hardly be necessary to premise that the Red Sea and Mediterranean are separated by a strip of desert about seventy-five miles across. The ancient kings of Egypt, struck with the vast importance of uniting the navigation of the two seas, at an early period attempted this great work. Nechos II., the Necho of Scripture, and son of Psammeticus, after defeating the Assyrians, and slaying Josiah king of Judah, B.C. 610, commenced a canal that was to unite the Red Sea with the Pelusiac or eastern branch of the Nile, which communicated with the Mediterranean, almost directly north from the present Suez, near the ancient city of Pelusium. Some give it a much greater antiquity, attributing it to the great Sesostris, or Rhameses III., the founder, among other vast works, of the Giant Hall of Columns of the Palace at Carnac, and under whose reign Egypt arrived at her zenith of power and prosperity. This canal is supposed by Herodotus to have joined the Nile near the old Bubastis, to have been filled by the water of the river, and to have been completed, or rather continued, by Darius Hystaspes. Diodorus Siculus states it to have been finished by Ptolemy II. Herodotus tells us that the first works, which cost 120,000 men their lives, were arrested in their progress by the oracle which Nechos consulted, and which declared that the canal would open Egypt to foreign invasion. Its width was calculated by Strabo at one hundred and fifty feet, and by Pliny at one hundred feet. Herodotus informs us, it was broad enough to admit two triremes to move abreast, and that it required four days for a vessel to pass through it. Strabo says, it was provided with water-gates (locks?) and broad enough to admit ships of the largest class. Pliny calculates its depth at thirty feet.