Episode Details

In 31 BCE, with Octavian's forces closing in, Cleopatra had her ships dragged overland across the Suez isthmus toward the Red Sea, because the ancient canal there had silted into a muddy trench. The first attempts to pierce this land ran west to east, linking the Nile to the Red Sea through the Wadi Tumilat, possibly as early as pharaohs like Senusret or Ramesses II. Around 600 BCE Necho II pushed a major extension, and Herodotus claimed 120,000 men died digging it, before an oracle warned that only foreigners would benefit and he stopped. The Persian king Darius I finished it and carved granite stelae boasting of ships sailing from Egypt to Persia, but a receding Red Sea and relentless Nile silt made every canal a losing battle, even after Trajan and later caliphs restored it.

When Portugal rounded Africa, Venetian leaders debated digging a canal themselves to save their spice monopoly. Napoleon's 1798 expedition mapped the old canal's ruins, yet British opposition, voiced bluntly by Lord Palmerston, stalled a new one for decades. Ferdinand de Lesseps used his friendship with Said Pasha to win a concession in 1854, and the lockless canal was dug from 1859 to 1869, first by forced corvee labor amid cholera epidemics. It opened in November 1869 with a lavish celebration, and its shock to warehoused British trade goods helped trigger the Panic of 1873.

• A bankrupt Isma'il Pasha sold Egypt's 44 percent share for four million pounds in 1875, and Britain, the canal's old opponent, bought it.
• Britain cited protecting the canal to invade and occupy Egypt in 1882.
• After Nasser nationalized it in 1956, conflict closed the canal from 1967 to 1975, spurring the rise of supertankers.
• A 9 billion dollar expansion in 2014 and 2015 added a parallel channel, and revenue hit a record 9.4 billion dollars in fiscal 2023.
• The stuck Ever Given held up about 3 billion dollars of cargo a day in 2021, and Houthi attacks later cost Egypt 800 million dollars a month.