Suez Canal
Based on Wikipedia: Suez Canal
The Ditch That Changed Everything
In 1869, a French diplomat named Ferdinand de Lesseps accomplished something that had defeated pharaohs, Persian emperors, Roman conquerors, and Ottoman sultans for three thousand years. He dug a hole through Egypt.
That hole—193 kilometers of seawater cutting through sand and ancient lake beds—became the Suez Canal, one of the most consequential pieces of infrastructure in human history. It sliced through the Isthmus of Suez, the thin strip of land that connects Africa to Asia, and in doing so, it transformed global trade, reshaped imperial politics, and quite literally redrew the map of the world.
Before the canal, a ship sailing from London to Mumbai had to travel all the way around Africa, hugging the Cape of Good Hope at the continent's southern tip. The journey stretched nearly 21,000 kilometers. After the canal opened, that same voyage shrank by almost 9,000 kilometers. What once took months now took weeks. The economics of global shipping changed overnight.
An Idea Older Than Rome
The dream of connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea is ancient—far older than most people realize.
The earliest attempts date back nearly four thousand years, to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt. Pharaoh Senusret the Third, who ruled from around 1878 to 1839 BCE, may have been the first to seriously attempt the project. But his canal didn't run north-south like the modern Suez. Instead, it ran east-west, connecting the Nile River to the Red Sea through a dry valley called Wadi Tumilat.
This makes sense when you understand the geography. The Nile was Egypt's superhighway, the source of all commerce and communication. Any canal worth building needed to connect to it. The idea was simple: sail down the Nile, turn east at the right spot, and emerge into the Red Sea bound for Arabia, India, or the spice islands beyond.
The problem was equally simple: the desert kept reclaiming the canal.
Around 600 BCE, Pharaoh Necho the Second tried again. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Necho poured vast resources into the project. He allegedly lost 120,000 workers in the attempt—a number that Herodotus himself admits is probably exaggerated, but which gives you a sense of the project's scale and difficulty.
Necho never finished. Herodotus claims the pharaoh received a warning from an oracle that he was building it for the benefit of foreign invaders, not Egypt. More practically, Necho found himself at war with Nebuchadnezzar the Second of Babylon, and the canal became a luxury Egypt couldn't afford.
The Persian King Who Finished What Pharaohs Started
The oracle's prophecy, if there ever was one, proved accurate. The canal was finally completed not by an Egyptian but by a Persian conqueror.
Darius the First—Darius the Great—ruled the Persian Empire from 522 to 486 BCE, and his domain included a recently conquered Egypt. Darius saw the strategic value of a waterway connecting his Mediterranean possessions to the Persian Gulf. He finished what Necho had started.
The canal was impressive by any standard. Herodotus reports it was wide enough for two triremes—the warships of the ancient world—to pass each other with their oars fully extended. Sailing through it took four days.
Darius was proud of his achievement. He erected granite monuments along the canal's route, inscribed in four languages. One of these stelae, discovered near modern Suez, declares:
King Darius says: I am a Persian; setting out from Persia I conquered Egypt. I ordered to dig this canal from the river that is called Nile and flows in Egypt, to the sea that begins in Persia. Therefore, when this canal had been dug as I had ordered, ships went from Egypt through this canal to Persia, as I had intended.
The inscription captures something essential about the canal's nature. It was never just a commercial convenience. It was always a statement of power, a declaration that the ruler who controlled it could bend geography to his will.
The Curse of Silt
Darius's canal lasted, with interruptions and repairs, for nearly two thousand years. Ptolemy the Second reopened and improved it around 270 BCE, adding an ingenious lock system that prevented saltwater from the Red Sea from contaminating the freshwater of the Nile.
The Roman Emperor Trajan restored it in the first century CE, renaming it after himself. When the Arab armies conquered Egypt in 641 CE, their commander Amr ibn al-As ordered the canal dredged again to facilitate trade between Egypt and the new Muslim capital at Medina.
But the canal had an implacable enemy: the Nile itself.
The great river that made Egypt possible also made the east-west canal nearly impossible to maintain. Every year, the Nile flooded, depositing millions of tons of silt across the delta. The canal's connection to the river acted like a drain, sucking in sediment that gradually choked the waterway. Each generation that reopened the canal bought perhaps a century of use before it silted up again.
There was another problem too. The Red Sea itself was slowly retreating southward. In ancient times, its northern arm had extended much closer to the Bitter Lakes that now form part of the modern canal. As the centuries passed, the distance between the Nile and the sea grew longer, making the canal more expensive to maintain.
By the time of Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, the east-west canal had become useless. When she needed to escape Egypt after her defeat at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, she couldn't sail her fleet through any waterway. Instead, she tried to drag her ships overland across the isthmus—a desperate measure that failed when Arab raiders burned her vessels.
The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur reportedly ordered the canal permanently closed in 767 CE to cut off supplies to rebels in Arabia. After that, the ancient waterway faded into legend, its route gradually buried under drifting sand.
The Canal That Wasn't Built
For the next thousand years, the idea of an Egyptian canal remained a dream—tantalizing but impractical.
When Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, he opened an all-water route from Europe to Asia that bypassed the Middle East entirely. The great trading cities of the Mediterranean—Venice especially—watched helplessly as their commercial empires withered. Venetian merchants actually proposed building a canal through Egypt, but the Ottoman conquest of the region in 1517 killed any such plans.
The Ottomans themselves considered the project. Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, one of the most capable administrators in Ottoman history, pushed for a canal in the sixteenth century. His motives were strategic: European powers were increasingly active in the Indian Ocean, threatening Ottoman trade routes and holy sites. A canal would allow the Ottoman navy to quickly move ships between the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Black Sea.
The project was judged too expensive. It never left the planning stage.
Napoleon's Survey and a Costly Mistake
The modern canal story begins, improbably, with a military debacle.
In 1798, a young French general named Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt. His ostensible goal was to threaten British India and disrupt English trade. His actual achievements were mostly cultural: he brought along a cadre of scientists, archaeologists, and engineers who produced the monumental Description de l'Égypte, a comprehensive survey of the country's antiquities and geography.
Among their discoveries were traces of the ancient canal. Napoleon's surveyors mapped the old route and confirmed that a waterway had once connected the Nile to the Red Sea. But when they calculated the relative water levels, they made a catastrophic error.
They concluded that the Red Sea was 8.5 meters higher than the Mediterranean.
If this were true, a sea-level canal would be impossible. Water would flow from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean, potentially flooding the Nile Delta and creating an ecological catastrophe. Any canal would require an elaborate system of locks—expensive, slow, and requiring constant maintenance.
Napoleon abandoned the idea. The error would persist for decades, discouraging every subsequent proposal.
Ferdinand de Lesseps and the Ten-Year Dig
The man who finally built the Suez Canal was not an engineer. Ferdinand de Lesseps was a French diplomat, charming and ambitious, with excellent connections in Egyptian high society. He had served as a consul in Egypt and befriended Said Pasha, who would later become the country's ruler.
When Said came to power in 1854, de Lesseps saw his opportunity. He convinced the new viceroy to grant him a concession to build a canal—not the old east-west route along the Nile, but a radical new approach: a direct north-south cut from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.
This route was longer—about 160 kilometers compared to the ancient canal's 100 kilometers—but it solved the silt problem entirely. The new canal would never connect to the Nile. It would be a sea-level waterway, fed only by the Mediterranean and Red Seas, with no locks and no sediment-carrying river to choke it.
The engineering challenges were formidable. The canal would need to cut through sandy desert, the dry bed of Lake Timsah, the enormous depression of the Bitter Lakes, and finally a ridge of hard rock near Suez. Fresh water for the workers would have to be brought in from the Nile through a separate supply canal.
In 1858, de Lesseps formed the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez and began selling shares. The French public bought enthusiastically. The British, whose empire depended on the sea route around Africa, were hostile—they saw the canal as a French scheme to challenge British naval supremacy. British diplomats and newspapers attacked the project relentlessly.
Construction began in 1859. It would take ten years.
The Human Cost
The canal was built largely by Egyptian labor. Initially, this labor was conscripted—forced. The Egyptian government provided corvée workers, peasants dragooned from their fields to dig in the desert.
Conditions were brutal. Workers labored in extreme heat, often without adequate water or shelter. Disease was rampant. The exact death toll is unknown and disputed, but it was certainly substantial. Some estimates suggest tens of thousands of workers died during the construction.
In 1863, the Egyptian government abolished corvée labor under pressure from the British, who cynically used humanitarian arguments to obstruct a project they opposed for strategic reasons. De Lesseps was forced to mechanize. He brought in steam-powered dredges and excavators—technology that would prove essential to completing the project but that could have saved thousands of lives had it been used from the beginning.
The canal opened on November 17, 1869, with an extravagant celebration. The Khedive Ismail, Egypt's ruler, hosted heads of state from across Europe. The Empress Eugénie of France led a procession of ships through the waterway. The Austrian emperor, the Crown Prince of Prussia, and dignitaries from dozens of nations attended.
The party was spectacular. Egypt nearly went bankrupt paying for it.
How the Canal Works
The Suez Canal is what engineers call a sea-level canal. Unlike the Panama Canal, which uses locks to lift ships over a mountain range, the Suez has no locks at all. Ships simply sail through.
This is possible because the Mediterranean and Red Seas are almost exactly the same height. The surveyors who worked for Napoleon had simply gotten their measurements wrong, probably because they used fragmentary data taken under wartime conditions. When French engineers resurveyed the isthmus in the 1840s, they discovered the error. The seas differ in level by less than a meter, and tides and seasonal variations account for most of that difference.
The canal runs roughly north to south, from Port Said on the Mediterranean to the city of Suez on the Red Sea. Along the way, it passes through several bodies of water: Lake Manzala, Lake Timsah, and the Great and Little Bitter Lakes. These lakes, which were mostly dry salt flats before the canal was dug, filled with seawater and now form natural widening points where ships can pass each other.
The water in the canal doesn't sit still. North of the Bitter Lakes, currents flow northward in winter and southward in summer. South of the lakes, the flow changes with the tides at Suez. This constant movement helps prevent the stagnation and biological fouling that plague many artificial waterways.
Originally, the canal was a single lane. Ships had to pass each other at designated spots: the Ballah Bypass and the Great Bitter Lake. This created bottlenecks. Convoys of ships would gather at each end, waiting for the canal to clear before proceeding. Transit took many hours.
The canal has been widened and deepened multiple times since 1869. A major expansion completed in 2015 added 35 kilometers of new parallel channel, allowing ships to pass each other along much of the route. The capacity nearly doubled, from 49 ships per day to 97.
Strategic Prize and Point of Conflict
From the moment it opened, the Suez Canal became one of the most strategically important pieces of real estate on Earth.
The British, who had opposed its construction, quickly recognized its value. The canal cut thousands of miles off the route to India, the jewel of the British Empire. In 1875, when the Khedive Ismail found himself drowning in debt—partly from the canal celebration's extravagance—the British government bought Egypt's shares in the canal company. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli financed the purchase with a loan from the Rothschild banking family.
By 1882, Britain had occupied Egypt entirely, using a nationalist uprising as pretext. Though Egypt remained nominally independent, British troops guarded the canal zone for the next seventy years. The waterway became the spine of the British Empire, the essential link between the home islands and their possessions in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific.
During both World Wars, the canal was a major strategic objective. Ottoman forces attacked it in 1915. German and Italian forces threatened it in 1942, and their failure to capture it was one of the turning points of the North African campaign.
The Suez Crisis
The most dramatic chapter in the canal's history came in 1956, when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized it.
Nasser was a revolutionary Arab nationalist who had overthrown Egypt's monarchy in 1952. He sought to modernize Egypt and free it from Western influence. When the United States and Britain withdrew funding for the Aswan High Dam—a project Nasser saw as essential to Egypt's development—he retaliated by seizing the canal.
The move was technically legal. The canal sat entirely within Egyptian territory, and Nasser offered compensation to shareholders. But it enraged Britain and France, who saw it as an assault on their interests and prestige. Israel, which Egypt had banned from using the canal since 1950, saw an opportunity to strike at its regional enemy.
The three nations colluded in a secret attack. Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula on October 29, 1956. Britain and France, pretending to separate the combatants, issued ultimatums to both sides and then bombed Egyptian airfields.
It was a disaster. The United States, under President Dwight Eisenhower, was furious. Eisenhower saw the attack as old-fashioned colonialism and feared it would drive Arab nations into Soviet arms. He threatened to crash the British pound unless the invaders withdrew.
They did. The Suez Crisis marked the end of Britain and France as independent great powers. Thereafter, they would defer to American leadership on major international issues. Egypt kept the canal.
Closure and the Yellow Fleet
The canal's strangest episode came during the Six-Day War of 1967.
When Israel and Egypt went to war in June of that year, fifteen cargo ships happened to be transiting the canal. Egyptian forces sank ships at both ends, trapping the vessels in the Great Bitter Lake. They would remain there for eight years.
The ships, which became known as the Yellow Fleet because of the desert sand that caked them, became an accidental international community. Crews from eight different nations organized sports competitions, printed a newspaper, and even issued their own postage stamps. Most of the original sailors were eventually rotated home, replaced by skeleton crews who maintained the ships through the long wait.
The canal didn't reopen until June 5, 1975—eight years to the day after it closed. Only two of the trapped ships, both German, were still seaworthy enough to sail out under their own power. The rest had to be towed.
The Canal Today
The Suez Canal is now operated by the Suez Canal Authority, an Egyptian government agency. It generates billions of dollars in annual revenue for Egypt—over $9 billion in good years—making it one of the country's most important economic assets.
More than 20,000 ships transit the canal each year, an average of about 56 per day. They carry roughly 12 percent of all global trade: oil from the Persian Gulf, manufactured goods from Asia, grain from Europe, and thousands of other commodities.
The canal remains governed by the Constantinople Convention of 1888, which guarantees free passage to ships of all nations "in time of war as in time of peace, without distinction of flag." In practice, this principle has been honored more in the breach than the observance—Egypt blocked Israeli ships for decades and closed the canal entirely during multiple wars—but the legal framework remains.
The waterway is not without alternatives. The old route around Africa still exists, and when the container ship Ever Given blocked the canal for six days in March 2021, many vessels diverted around the Cape of Good Hope. But the detour adds weeks to transit times and millions of dollars in fuel costs. For most shipping, the canal remains indispensable.
The Chokepoint Problem
The Ever Given incident highlighted a vulnerability that strategists had long recognized. The Suez Canal is a chokepoint—a narrow passage that concentrates traffic and creates opportunities for disruption.
At its narrowest, the canal is only 205 meters wide. The largest container ships, which can measure 400 meters long and 60 meters wide, have almost no margin for error. A mechanical failure, a navigation mistake, or even unusual weather can ground a vessel and block all traffic.
That's exactly what happened on March 23, 2021, when the Ever Given, one of the largest container ships in the world, lost steerage in a sandstorm and ran aground. The ship wedged itself diagonally across the channel, its bow buried in the eastern bank, its stern nearly touching the western side. It blocked the canal completely.
For six days, nothing moved. Hundreds of ships backed up at both ends. Global supply chains, already strained by the COVID-19 pandemic, convulsed. Analysts estimated that the blockage held up roughly $9.6 billion in trade per day.
Eventually, a fleet of tugboats and dredgers freed the Ever Given, aided by an unusually high tide. But the incident demonstrated how fragile the global trading system had become—how much of the world's commerce flows through a single narrow ditch in the Egyptian desert, as dependent on that passage as it was when de Lesseps first opened it more than 150 years ago.
A Monument to Ambition
The Suez Canal is, in the end, a monument to human ambition—both its possibilities and its costs.
It represents an engineering triumph, the successful completion of a project that defeated some of history's greatest rulers. It reshaped global commerce, shortened the distance between continents, and made the modern globalized economy possible.
But it was also built on the labor of tens of thousands of anonymous workers, many of whom died in the desert sand. It has been the prize in wars, the trigger of international crises, and the instrument of imperial domination. Its history is inseparable from the history of colonialism, nationalism, and great-power competition.
Today, more than 56 ships pass through the canal every day, their passage so routine that it barely makes the news. Sailors see the desert on either side, the sand-colored banks where pharaohs once dreamed of connecting two seas. The journey takes about twelve hours. The ancient kings who first imagined it would have considered that a miracle.
Perhaps it still is.