1881 drawing of the Suez Canal

The Suez Canal (Arabic, Qanā al-Suways), west of the Sinai Peninsula, forms a 163 km (118 miles) ship canal in Egypt between Port Said (Būr Sa'īd) on the Mediterranean and Suez (al-Suways) on the Red Sea.

The canal allows water transport from Europe to Asia without circumnavigating Africa. Before the construction of the canal, some transport was conducted by offloading ships and carrying the goods overland between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

The canal consists of two parts, north and south of the Great Bitter Lake.

Around the 13th century BC, the Suez Canal was dug between the Nile River and the Red Sea. Because the Nile River deposits much sediment however the canal probably quickly clogged.

By the 8th century CE the Suez Canal had become unnavigable and likely remained unnavigable for the next thousand years.

Then in 1854, having obtained a royal concession from Said on the evening of 15 November (the formal paperwork arrived on 30 November 1854), the Suez Canal was built again between 25 April 1859 and 1869 by the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez (Universal Suez Ship Canal Company) led by Ferdinand de Lesseps while the plan for the project was created by Alois Negrelli, an Austrian engineer, the canal was owned by the Egyptian government and France. The first ship to pass through the canal did so on 17 February 1867 and it was inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony on 17 November 1869 (the proceedings had begun the day before); Giuseppe Verdi wrote the famous opera Aida for this ceremony. It is estimated that 1.5 million Egyptians worked on the canal and that 125,000 died, many due to cholera.

The canal had an immediate and dramatic effect on world trade. It played an important role in increasing European penetration of Africa. External debts forced Isma'il Pasha to sell his country's share in the canal to the United Kingdom, and British troops moved in to protect it in 1882, controlling the country until 1952. The canal also allowed Europeans far easier access to East Africa and this area was soon carved up by European powers.

The success of the canal encouraged the French to embark on building the Panama Canal, a task that they were unable to complete, however.

On 26 July 1956, the newly established republican government of Egypt under president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal, which caused Britain, France and Israel to invade in the week-long Suez War, also known as the Tripartite Invasion. As a result of the war, the canal was closed for several months. The United Nations declared the canal Egyptian property.

After the Six Day War in 1967, the canal remained closed until June 5, 1975. A UN peacekeeping force has been stationed in the Sinai Peninsula since 1974.

Picture of the Suez Canal from Earth orbit, courtesy NASA.

The canal has no locks because there is no sea level difference and no hills to climb. The canal allows ships with up to 15 m (50 feet) of draught to pass, and improvements are planned to increase this to 22 m (72 feet) by 2010 to allow supertanker passage. Presently supertankers can offload part of their load onto a canal-owned boat and reload at the other end of the canal. There is one shipping lane with several passing areas.

Some 15,000 ships pass through the canal each year, bearing about 14% of world shipping. The passage takes between 11 and 16 hours.

Since 1980 there is a road tunnel and since 1999 a powerline crosses Suez Canal.

Connections between the shores

For north to south:

• In El Qantara there is a high-level fixed road bridge.
• In 2001 the El Ferdan railway bridge 20 km north of Ismailia was completed: the longest swing span bridge in the world, with a span of 340m. The previous bridge was destroyed in 1967 during the Arab-Israeli conflict.
• South of the Great Bitter Lake is the Ahmed Hamdi tunnel, built in 1983. Because of leakage problems, in the period 1992–1995 a new water-tight tunnel was built inside the old one.

External links

• Constantinople Convention of the Suez Canal, 1888 (http://www.mfa.gov.eg/English/Treaties/ConstantinopleConventionOfTheSuezCanal.aspx?ph=43)
• El Ferdan railway bridge (http://www.halcrow.com/archivenews_nov01_swingbrid.asp)
• Parting the Desert (http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?037570812X) by Zachary Karabell

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