Canal of Darius: The Ancient Nile-Red Sea Waterway

The Canal of Darius was an ancient waterway linking the Nile with the Red Sea, completed around 500 BC by the Persian king Darius I after Persia conquered Egypt. Known from Darius’s own inscribed stelae near Suez and from the Greek historian Herodotus, it allowed ships to sail from the Nile to the Red Sea and on towards Persia. It was a forerunner, in idea if not in route, of the modern Suez Canal.

Background: Necho’s unfinished canal

Egypt had long traded with lands along the Red Sea, but goods had to be carried overland between the Nile valley and the coast. According to Herodotus, the pharaoh Necho II (reigned c. 610-595 BC) began a canal to solve this problem. He reports that 120,000 Egyptians died in the work before Necho halted it after an oracle warned that he was labouring for a foreigner. The death toll is almost certainly exaggerated, and the story is hard to verify.

In 525 BC the Persian king Cambyses II conquered Egypt, which became a province of the Achaemenid Empire. When Darius I took the throne in 522 BC, he set about strengthening Persian rule in Egypt, codifying Egyptian laws and supporting temples. Completing the canal fitted his wider interest in communications across the empire.

Route and construction

The canal started from the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, near the city of Bubastis, and ran east along the Wadi Tumilat, a natural valley. It then turned south through the Bitter Lakes to reach the Red Sea near modern Suez. Herodotus says the voyage took four days and that the channel was wide enough for two triremes to pass abreast.

The precise date of completion is uncertain. Many historians place it around 500-497 BC, possibly linked to a visit by Darius to Egypt. Later Greek writers such as Strabo and Diodorus claimed that Darius stopped short of finishing it, having been told that the Red Sea was higher than Egypt and would flood the land. Darius’s own inscriptions, however, state clearly that the canal was dug and that ships sailed through it.

The Suez stelae

To commemorate the work, Darius set up a series of large red granite stelae along the canal, at sites including Tell el-Maskhuta, Kabret, Chalouf (Shaluf) and near Suez. Each carried text in the three cuneiform languages of the Persian court, Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, on one side, and an Egyptian hieroglyphic version on the other.

The Old Persian text, as translated by Roland Kent, begins with Darius’s titles and continues with his statement that, as a Persian, he had seized Egypt and ordered this canal to be dug from the Nile to the sea that goes from Persia. It ends by saying the canal was dug as he commanded and ships went through it from Egypt to Persia. The Egyptian version adds a longer account of the work and lists the peoples of the empire.

The stelae were found in broken condition in the 19th century, several during the building of the Suez Canal in the 1860s. Fragments are now in museums, including the Louvre in Paris.

Later history

The canal needed constant clearing because of silt and drifting sand. Ptolemy II Philadelphus restored it around 270 BC, as recorded on the Pithom Stele, and according to Diodorus added a lock or sluice at the Red Sea end. The Roman emperor Trajan (ruled AD 98-117) built a new branch, known as the Amnis Traianus, starting near Babylon of Egypt (Old Cairo).

After the Arab conquest of Egypt, the governor Amr ibn al-As reopened the canal in the 640s to ship grain to Arabia. It was closed around 767 on the orders of the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur, reportedly to cut supplies to rebels in Arabia, and was never reopened. In 1799 engineers with Napoleon’s expedition surveyed its traces.

Timeline

• c. 610-595 BC: Necho II begins a canal from the Nile towards the Red Sea, according to Herodotus.
• 525 BC: Cambyses II conquers Egypt for Persia.
• c. 500-497 BC: Darius I completes the canal and erects inscribed stelae along its route.
• c. 270 BC: Ptolemy II restores the canal.
• AD 98-117: Trajan builds a new branch from near Old Cairo.
• 640s: Amr ibn al-As reopens the canal to ship grain to Arabia.
• c. 767: The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur orders the canal closed.
• 1860s: Fragments of Darius’s stelae are found during construction of the modern Suez Canal.

Why it matters

The Canal of Darius shows the ambition of the Persian Empire to link its far-flung provinces by water as well as by land, alongside routes such as the Royal Road. Its multilingual stelae are key documents of Persian rule in Egypt, and its long history of restoration over more than a thousand years makes it the direct ancestor of every later plan to join the Mediterranean world with the Indian Ocean.