Is Nefertiti behind the wall?

Archeologists hoping King Tut’s tomb holds answer to 3,345-year-old secret

Experts in Egypt are '90 per cent positive' that there is a room hidden just beyond Tut's burial grounds. And some are convinced Nefertiti is in it...

When Nicholas Reeves announced in August 2015 that he’d found the tomb of the ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti concealed behind a wall in the burial chamber of King Tut, it seemed like another outlandish theory from another Egyptologist hoping to make his mark. After all, Nefertiti has been dead for 3,345 years, and no one has found her final resting place in that time. How could it be hiding in plain sight, just inches from a place frequented by tens of thousands of tourists and archeologists for nearly 100 years?

King Tut tomb in Luxor

But in the past few months, skepticism has been transformed into excitement as evidence for Reeves’s theory has mounted. On Saturday, after two days conducting radar scans of Tutankhamun’s millennia-old tomb, Egypt’s Antiquities Minister Mamdouh Eldamaty announced he was “90 per cent positive” that another room is hidden just beyond the burial chamber’s north wall.

Anything could be inside the sealed-off room in Egypt’s sun-baked Valley of Kings. But if it really holds Nefertiti’s remains, as Reeves proposes, it would be “one of the most important finds of the century” Eldamaty said at a news conference.

Standing inside Tut’s tomb, Eldamaty explained that a wall painted with scenes from the boy king’s burial ceremony is made of two different materials, indicating that there is likely an empty space behind it. Scans also revealed empty space behind another of the chamber’s walls.

The imaging was conducted by Japanese radar specialist Hirokatsu Watanabe, National Geographic reported. Pushing a radar machine on a metal trolley rigged to look like a high-tech lawn mower, he slowly inched along the walls of the hot and airless chamber while journalists and antiquities experts watched in breathless silence.

The radar scans have been sent to Japan for further study; the results of Japanese investigators’ evaluation should be announced in a month, according to Reuters. If their analysis confirms Eldamaty’s belief, researchers will develop a plan to figure out what’s inside the hidden room — and how to get it out.

“Everything is adding up,” Reeves told National Geographic.

“The tomb is not giving up its secrets easily,” he continued. “But it is giving them up, bit by bit. It’s another result. And nothing is contradicting the basic direction of the theory.”

 

Mysterious Queen Nefertiti

Reeves’s theory, which is convoluted even by Egyptology’s cryptic standards, goes like this: Nefertiti, the first wife and co-regent of the Egyptian king Akhenaten, took power after the king died. First as Nefertutaten, then using the man’s name Smenkhkare to garner greater legitimacy, she ruled until her own death, when she was given a pharaoh’s burial in a tomb of her own. When her stepson and successor Tutankhamun (believed to be the son of Akhenaten and one of his sister’s) died at age 19 after just nine years of rule, no tomb was prepared for him. Instead, Tut was hurriedly buried in an ante-chamber to Nefertiti’s tomb, and Nefertiti — a controversial queen who some at the time may have wished to forget — was left to languish behind a blocked-off wall.

Reeves acknowledges that it’s an eyebrow-raising proposal, one that challenges a lot of accepted thinking about Egypt’s tumultuous Amarna period, when Nefertiti and Tut both lived. For one thing, most scholars believe that the short-lived Smenkhkare was a king in his own right, not just an alias of Nefertiti. For another, it turns gender norms from the time on their head.

“There’s a lot of ‘I think’ in this article, I’m afraid,” he told the New Yorker in August.

But, Reeves argues, evidence for his theory is all over King Tut’s tomb. Not just in the hints of a hidden chamber — which Reeves first noticed by examining high resolution images published online by the Spanish foundation Factum Arte earlier this year — but in the art and architecture of the tomb itself.

Tutankhamun’s tomb is smaller and more modestly decorated than other royal tombs from the time. Even its discoverer, Howard Carter, commented on the un-kingly arrangement in his journals in the 1920s:

“The unfamiliar plan of (the) tomb repeatedly caused us to ask ourselves in our perplexity whether it was really a tomb or a Royal Cache?” Carter wrote.

Carter didn’t recognize the tomb as a king’s because it was really for a queen, Reeves says. The illustration on the tomb’s north wall — the one that purportedly conceals the hidden room — may bolster his claim.

Reeves says that the painting, long thought to show a young King Ay (Tut’s successor) performing a funerary ritual for an elderly-looking Tutankhamun, actually shows Tut performing the ritual for Nefertiti. The older figure shares several important features with the famous Nefertiti bust at the Egypt Museum in Berlin, he wrote in his paper published in August: they have the same long straight nose, rounded chin and deep groove at the corners of their mouths. The younger figure, meanwhile, seems to resemble contemporary images of Tut with its plump, boyish face and soft double chin.

Given the chaotic politics of the Amarna period, Reeves’s unorthodox version of events is not entirely inconceivable. Along with Akhenaten, Nefertiti led a religious revolution that turned Egypt into a monotheocracy devoted to worship of Aten, the sun god — a movement known as the “Atenist heresy.”

But Tut — who was originally named Tutankaten (“living image of Aten”) — reversed the change, restoring the god Amun to primacy and switching his name to Tutankhamun (“living image of Amun”). In those circumstances, it’s possible that those who buried Tut might have aimed to conceal evidence of Nefertiti’s reign and the “Atenist heresy” at the same time.

Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Reeves cautioned that excavators must proceed carefully, lest they damage the contents of a chamber that has been hermetically sealed for thousands of years.

“The key is to excavate slowly and carefully, and record well,” he said. “The fact is this isn’t a race. All archaeologies are disruption. We can’t go back and redo it, so we have to do it well in the first place.”

Meanwhile, Egyptians antiquities and tourism officials are watching with bated breath. In a country plagued by bouts of violence and an economy wracked by upheaval, the announcement of the “most important find of the century” would be a much-needed boon to tourism.

According to the New York Times, 12,000 people used to line up daily to see the ancient city of Luxor, across the Nile from the Valley of Kings. In 2012, a year after the revolution that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak, that number dropped to just 300. Tourists were just beginning to inch back to normal when a Russian airliner crashed in the Sinai Peninsula last month, prompting several countries to impose travel restrictions to Egypt and plunging the future of Egyptian tourism back into uncertainty.

“If we discover something, it will turn the world inside out,” Mustafa Waziry, the director of antiquities of Luxor, told the Times. “And they will come.”

Akhenaten: mad, bad, or brilliant?

He fathered Tutankhamun, married Nefertiti, and was one of the most original thinkers of his era. Then why is the pharaoh Akhenaten often dismissed as a madman?

Akhenaten

Almost 200 miles south of Cairo, in the heart of Middle Egypt, the archaeological site of Amarna occupies a great bay of desert beside the River Nile. To the uninformed eye, this semicircle of barren land, bound by the east bank of the river and enormous limestone cliffs, looks like nothing much: a vast, stricken dust bowl, approximately seven miles long and three miles wide, scattered with sandy hillocks. But 33 centuries ago, this spot was home to tens of thousands of ancient Egyptians, brought there by the will of a single man: the pharaoh Akhenaten.

Rebel, tyrant, and prophet of arguably the world’s earliest monotheistic religion, Akhenaten has been called history’s first individual. His impact upon ancient Egyptian customs and beliefs stretching back for centuries was so alarming that, in the generations following his death in 1336 BC, he was branded a heretic. Official king lists omitted his name.

For my money, this makes him the most fascinating and controversial figure in Egyptian history. And that’s before you consider his marriage to Nefertiti, known as the Mona Lisa of antiquity thanks to her austerely beautiful painted limestone bust discovered in a sculptor’s workshop at Amarna and now in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, or the likelihood that he fathered Tutankhamun, the most famous pharaoh of them all. If I were in charge of the British Museum, I would commission an exhibition about Akhenaten in a trice.

Akhenaten was not supposed to become pharaoh. The son of Amenhotep III, who dominated the first half of the 14th century BC, ruling over a court of unprecedented luxury and magnificence that placed great emphasis on solar theology, Prince Amenhotep, as he was then called, was younger brother to the crown Prince Thutmose. Following Thutmose’s unexpected death, though, he became the heir apparent – and when his father died in 1353 BC, he took the throne as Amenhotep IV. Almost immediately, his waywardness began to assert itself. He commissioned monumental buildings for the historic religious centre of Karnak in Thebes.

Amarna 

Yet rather than honor Amun, the god associated with the site, his temples were orientated towards the east, facing in the direction of the sunrise, and dedicated to a new form of the sun-god, known officially by the not-so-catchy formula of “The living one, Ra-Horus of the horizon who rejoices in the horizon in his identity of light which is in the sun disc.” Before long this was shortened to “the Aten”, the Egyptian word for “the sun disc”, and the king had changed his name from Amenhotep (“Amun is content”) to Akhenaten (“effective for the Aten”).

A number of colossal sandstone statues of the king carved for the temples of the Aten at Karnak, where they were attached to pillars in colonnades lining grand open courts, attest to the drastic convulsions coursing through Egyptian society at this time. One of them can be seen in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, which I visited while making the BBC documentary series Treasures of Ancient Egypt. The sculpture is like nothing seen before in the long history of ancient Egyptian art.

The pose and attributes are fairly standard. Akhenaten appears front-on. His crossed arms brandish a crook and a flail – royal insignia like his double crown, distinctive headdress, and short kilt. Yet the distortions of his physiognomy are bizarre beyond belief. His face appears stretched, with high cheekbones and an elongated nose leading down to a pointy chin. His unusually plump lips echo the womanly sensuousness of his broad hips, as well as an unflattering potbelly that sags over his waistband.

To modern eyes, the treatment of the figure appears expressionistic and grotesque. Is this a realistic portrait of a ruler wracked with disease? Or a new vision of kingship scorched free of visual clichés? Moreover, what kind of person would commission something as dark and startling as this: a visionary, or a madman?

Temple of "Aten"

“Views of Akhenaten have oscillated between both extremes,” says the Egyptologist Anna Stevens. “The ancient Egyptians excised his reign from their own history. But modern history has been kinder to him: we perhaps value individualism more – and of course we are not directly affected by his actions.”

“Without the basis for proper diagnosis, the charge of madness is best avoided,” says Barry Kemp, emeritus professor of Egyptology at Cambridge University, and author of The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. “But clearly Akhenaten had an original mind. He developed a vision of how God should be honoured, and had the determination and means to turn that vision into reality.” Akhenaten’s vision was extreme: by worshipping a single god, the solar orb, he was razing the Egyptian pantheon. Eventually he would ban the traditional gods altogether, making redundant up to 2,000 time-honoured deities. In the fifth year of his reign, around the time that he changed his name, Akhenaten decided to build a new royal capital – somewhere free of existing religious associations. The site he chose, at modern-day Amarna, was called Akhetaten, or “Horizon of the Aten” – perhaps because the shape of the cliffs to the east formed the hieroglyph for “horizon”.

Construction was rapid and after just two years, the ruling family took up residence to the north of the city in a palace linked to the rest of Akhetaten by a long “Royal Road”. Akhenaten rode along this route in his chariot every day, mirroring the progress of the Aten through the heavens in order to emphasize his proximity to the new godhead.

One God "Aten"

“It was a fresh start,” says Stevens, assistant director of the Amarna Project, which is excavating Akhenaten’s city. “Ostensibly it was about building a new cult home for the Aten on virgin land – this is what Akhenaten tells us in the inscriptions on the boundary stelae [inscribed stone slabs] around Amarna’s perimeter. But we can guess that there were other motivations, such as a desire to surround himself with loyal officials and create distance from those who offered opposition.” One way of demonstrating that Akhetaten represented a clean break with the past was by sponsoring radically new forms of architecture. “Egyptian temples were traditionally closed affairs,” explains Stevens. “Once you entered the inner part of the complex, the floor level gradually rose, and the roof dropped. Lighting was restricted to a few small windows and lamps. The solar cult brought with it open-air sanctuaries – a form used long before Akhenaten’s reign, but now translated to a much grander scale. Akhenaten’s temples incorporated vast open-air courts with offering tables and unroofed shrines. The cult image, of course, was no longer a statue hidden deep in the sanctuary, but the Aten above.”

Throughout Amarna, buildings were decorated with a new and immediately recognizable representation of the Aten: a simple disc emanating rays that culminated in tiny human hands. It is tempting to imagine these solar hands scooping up all the food and incense left out as offerings to the sun: the largest temple precinct in the city, the Great Aten Temple, contained more than 1,700 stone and mud-brick offering tables and benches built for just this purpose.

The strange new visual formula for the Aten wasn’t the only artistic innovation under Akhenaten. Over the years, Amarna has yielded a number of limestone reliefs presenting intimate scenes of the royal family enjoying domestic bliss – forerunners of Christian paintings of the Holy Family, or even of modern paparazzi photographs of celebrities. There is a famous example in Berlin. Akhenaten can be seen cradling one of his daughters as if he is about to kiss her. Opposite him is Nefertiti, whose lap supports a second daughter who is pointing at her sister. A third child, no bigger than a baby, plays with the serpent pendant adorning her mother’s distinctive flat-topped headdress. Above them the Aten beams down its many-handed benefaction.

Compared with earlier Egyptian art, which to the untutored eye can seem like an unending frieze of stiff figures seen in profile, here we have something charming, spontaneous, and full of life. Previously, Egyptian artists had depicted children adopting a distinctive pose, with a finger held against their lips – but here, the royal offspring behave more naturally. Wriggly and curious, they point and turn their heads in an irrepressible fashion – just like real children. While a lot of ancient Egyptian art has a static, monumental quality, as though self-consciously designed to last for eternity, this scene offers a transitory impression of royal family life. It feels as though we have stumbled into this particular room of the palace. The baby’s eye has been drawn to her mother’s glinting jewelry, but in a second or two her gaze will flick elsewhere, and the poses of the other protagonists will change.

Tutankhamun 

Why did Akhenaten wish to promote exciting new art like this? In part because he wanted to reinforce his solar cult: these scenes emphasized his role, as well as that of his wife, as intermediary between the Aten and the people. Perhaps this is also why one of his palaces at Amarna was designed with a special balcony known as the “window of appearances”: millennia before our Royal Family would stand on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, Akhenaten displayed himself above his courtiers, to whom he dispensed gifts such as leather gloves, gold collars and signet rings.

Recent discoveries at Amarna, though, suggest that Akhenaten’s cult of the Aten was not as successful as he might have hoped. Anna Stevens has excavated the cemetery where the workers who erected Akhenaten’s palaces and temples were interred in shallow graves. “For most people,” she says, “life was tough – with hard labor and a basic diet” – the antithesis of the relaxed family scene depicted on the relief in Berlin. More than two thirds of these workers were dead before they were 35 years old.

Nefertiti

Moreover, Stevens noticed a surprising absence among the grave goods buried in the cemetery. There were lots of amulets and votive objects depicting popular minor deities – including faience (glazed earthenware figures) of the bandy-legged dwarf god Bes, who offered protection during childbirth, and had been worshipped for centuries. “But there is not a single representation of the sun disc at this cemetery, nor mention of Akhenaten on finger rings or scarabs or anything,” she says. “This was life continuing as normal.”

Without the support of the people, there was nobody to uphold Akhenaten’s one-man revolution when he died after 17 years on the throne. Even Akhenaten himself appears to have had doubts on his deathbed: his tomb contained “shabti” figurines that were heresy for Atenism. Four years later, when his young son Tutankhamun became king in 1332 BC, the forces of conservatism won out. Tutankhamun issued a decree lamenting the ruinous state of the country’s temples: “Their shrines had fallen into decay, having become mounds thick with weeds. The land was in distress; the gods were ignoring this land.” Akhetaten – at its zenith, home to up to 50,000 people – was abandoned, as the court returned to the traditional capital of Memphis. Old religious customs were restored. Akhenaten was effectively written out of history.

For ancient Egyptians, Akhenaten was a madman, a megalomaniac, a dreamer and a despot. But he was also a brave reformer who single-handedly set about dismantling Egypt’s traditions in order to construct something new. Ultimately, though, his vision burned too brightly.

“Atenism offered little to people who wanted the comfort of a god who could be approached by anyone, even in their own home,” says Barry Kemp. “Akhenaten’s message was just too austere to gather widespread support.” Just imagine, though, what would have happened if his new religion had caught on: perhaps today we would mention Atenism in the same breath as other great monotheistic faiths such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Credits: Alastair Sooke from the Daily Telegraph

Ramses III King of Egypt

Ramses III King of Egypt

King of Egypt

Ramses III, Ramses also spelled Ramesses or Rameses (died 1156 bce, Thebes, Egypt), king of ancient Egypt (reigned 1187–56 bce) who defended his country against foreign invasion in three great wars, thus ensuring tranquility during much of his reign. In his final years, however, he faced internal disturbances, and he was ultimately killed in an attempted coup d’état.

Son of Setnakht (reigned 1190–87 bce), founder of the 20th dynasty (1190–1075 bce), Ramses found Egypt upon his accession only recently recovered from the unsettled political conditions that had plagued the land at the end of the previous dynasty. In the fifth year of his reign, a coalition of Libyan tribes invaded the western Nile River delta on the pretext that the pharaoh had interfered in their chief’s succession. The Libyans had in fact encroached upon Egyptian lands, a perennial problem during the 19th and 20th dynasties, and were soundly defeated in a battle in the western delta.

After two years of peace, another, more dangerous coalition, the Sea People, a conglomeration of migrating peoples from Asia Minor and the Mediterranean islands who had previously destroyed the powerful Hittite empire in Asia Minor and devastated Syria, advanced against Egypt by land and by sea. Ramses’ land army checked the enemy’s advance in southernmost Palestine, and the hostile ships were trapped after being lured into the waterways of the delta. Egypt averted conquest by the northerners, but two of the invading peoples settled on the coast of Palestine, between Gaza and Mount Carmel. The attempted invasion ended Egyptian pretensions to a Syro-Palestinian hegemony.

War battles bas-relief

Two more years of peace ensued, but in Ramses’ 11th year a new coalition of Libyan tribes infiltrated the western delta. Compelled to wage yet another war, he defeated the Libyans after capturing their chief. After this final conflict, Ramses was able to finish his great funerary temple, palace, and town complex at Madīnat Habu, in western Thebes. He also built additions to Karnak, the great Theban temple complex, and encouraged trade and industry, dispatching a seaborne trading expedition to Punt, a land on the Somali coast of Africa, and exploiting the copper mines at Sinai and probably also the gold mines of Nubba, Egypt’s province to the south.

After a prosperous middle reign, administrative difficulties and conspiracy troubled Ramses’ last years. About year 28 of the king’s reign, the vizier of Lower Egypt was ousted because of corruption. A year later the workers employed on the royal tombs at Thebes went on strike because of delay in the delivery of their monthly rations. Only the intervention of the Upper Egyptian vizier, who had assumed responsibility for the whole country, ended the work stoppage.

Toward the end of Ramses’ reign, one of his secondary wives, seeking to place her son on the throne, plotted to assassinate the king. Written sources show that the coup failed and that the conspirators were successfully brought to trial. However, it remained unclear from the documents whether Ramses had survived the assassination attempt.

Captured war enemies

The King’s mummy displayed no obvious wounds, and questions about his fate were left open to speculation for many years. In 2012 researchers announced that a CT scan had revealed a deep knife wound in the mummy’s throat, indicating that Ramses was indeed murdered by the conspirators. He died at Thebes in the 32nd year of his reign and was succeeded by the crown prince Ramses IV.

Extracts from encyclopaedia Britanica

Nefertiti

Nefertiti Biography

An Egyptian queen renowned for her beauty, Nefertiti ruled alongside her husband, Pharaoh Akhenaten, during the mid-1300s B.C.

Queen Nefertiti

Synopsis

Nefertiti, whose name means "a beautiful woman has come," was the queen of Egypt and wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten during the 14th century B.C. She and her husband established the cult of Aten, the sun god, and promoted Egyptian artwork that was radically different from its predecessors. A bust of Nefertiti is one of the most iconic symbols of Egypt.

Mysterious Origins

Little is known about the origins of Nefertiti, but her legacy of beauty and power continue to intrigue scholars today. Her name is Egyptian and means "a beautiful woman has come." Some evidence suggests that she hailed from the town Akhmim and is the daughter or niece of a high official named Ay. Other theories have suggested that she was born in a foreign country, possibly Syria.

The exact date when Nefertiti married Amenhotep III's son, the future pharaoh Amenhotep IV, is unknown. It is believed she was 15 when they wed, which may have been before Akhenaten assumed the throne. They apparently ruled together from 1353 to 1336 B.C. and had six daughters, with speculation that they may have also had a son. Their daughter Ankhesenamun would eventually marry her half brother Tutankhamun, the future ruler of Egypt. Artwork from the day depicts the couple and their daughters in an unusually naturalistic and individualistic style, more so than from earlier eras. The king and his head queen seem to be inseparable in reliefs, often shown riding in chariots together and even kissing in public. It has been stated that the couple may have had a genuine romantic connection, a dynamic not generally seen in depictions of ancient pharaohs.

Worship of the Sun God

Nefertiti and the pharaoh took an active role in establishing the Aten cult, a religious mythology which defined Aten, the sun, as the most important god and the only one worthy of worship in Egypt's polytheistic canon. Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten (also seen as "Akenhaten" in some references) to honor the deity. It is believed that the king and queen were priests and that it was only through them that ordinary citizens could obtain access to Aten. Nefertiti changed her name to Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, meaning "beautiful are the beauties of Aten, a beautiful woman has come," as a show of her absolutism for the new religion. The royal family resided in a constructed city called Akhetaton—in what is now known as el-Amarna—meant to honor their god. There were several open-air temples in the city, and at the center stood the palace.

Nefertiti was perhaps one of the most powerful women ever to have ruled. Her husband went to great lengths to display her as an equal. In several reliefs she is shown wearing the crown of a pharaoh or smiting her enemies in battle. But despite this great power, Nefertiti disappears from all depictions after 12 years. The reason for her disappearance is unknown. Some scholars believe she died, while others speculate she was elevated to the status of co-regent—equal in power to the pharaoh—and began to dress herself as a man. Other theories suggest she became known as Pharaoh Smenkhkare, ruling Egypt after her husband’s death or that she was exiled when the worship of the deity Amen-Ra came back into vogue.

Nefertiti Revealed?

In August 2015, American archaeologist Nicholas Reeves made a discovery that could reveal the mysteries of Nefertiti once and for all. While studying scans made of Tutankhamun's tomb, he noticed some wall markings that could indicate a hidden doorway. This fact and other structural anomalies suggest that there could be another chamber there, and Reeves has proposed that it could be the long-missing tomb of Nefertiti. If this proves true, it would be an astounding archaeological discovery and the most significant since Howard Carter's 1922 uncovering of Tutankhamun.

Credit / BIO magazine

The Other Suez Canal

The Canal of the Pharaohs

Nile Delta, from space. 

Area outlined in red is the probable location of the Canal of the Pharaohs    

The Suez Canal is not the first waterway to link the Mediterranean and Red Seas.

The present day Suez Canal is only the latest of its kind. As long ago as the 19^th Century B.C, Pharaoh Senusret II built a canal that connected the river Nile to the Red Sea! This so called Canal of the Pharaohs survived in one form or another for over 2500 years! In fact, a modern irrigation canal retraces the ancient route to this day.

As the river Nile approaches the Mediterranean, it branches into a massive delta with multiple distributaries. Pliny the Elder writes that at the time of Senusret, the Nile had seven distinct distributaries, the easternmost of which was called the Pelusiac. In 1850 BC, Senusret built a canal that linked the Pelusiac with the Bitter Lakes – a body of salt water in the Isthmus of Suez. At the time, the Bitter Lakes were directly connected to the Red Sea (the land has since risen and they no longer are). Since there were no bulldozers or gigantic dump trucks available, the Canal of the Pharaohs was built by hand, using bronze shovels and armies of slaves. For this was an era of slave power, and none were more skilled in its uses than the Egyptians. The engineers who built the pyramids understood how to direct their slaves to dig what was basically a very long trench. Thousands of slaves certainly died in the canal’s construction, but inflationary pressures on the slave industry were slight and there were several low cost suppliers, such as the Egyptian military and the Hittites.

The problem with building a canal in the middle of a desert is that it takes constant maintenance and repair to keep the desert from smothering the canal. As a result, the canal wasn’t always in the best working order – waxing and waning with the Pharaohs and the size of their tombs. There is some evidence however that The Canal of the Pharaohs remained in service for nearly 600 years, all the way into the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramases II, who ruled in the 13^th Century BC!

Darius the Great, the Persian master of half the known world, transformed the canal around 520 B.C. After his armies’ subjugated Egypt, it was probable he wanted to optimize the movement of his leading imports, like Egyptian wheat, as well as his leading export – Persian soldiers. The most efficient way to do either was to put them on ships and sail then back and forth from Persia. The solution – fix the old Egyptian canal that linked the Nile to the Red Sea. An Egyptian Pharaoh, Necho, had already begun construction in 600 BC, but after expending the lives of 100,000 slaves (or so Herodotus claims), had abandoned the project, although presumably not from a sense of guilt.

Darius did more than fix Necho’s canal. By now, due to geographical changes, the Red Sea and The Bitter Lakes were no longer connected. Darius rectified the situation and linked the two. You could do things like that, even in the ancient world, if you were the supreme lord and master of a good chunk of humanity. Darius’s new canal was nearly 140 km long and so wide that two triremes could ply its length side by side. A ship could cross the canal in just 4 days! Darius almost certainly expended considerable expense on the endeavor, which he could afford to, since he was flush with gold and slaves from the lands cowering at his Imperial feet. Darius was so pleased with the results (and himself) that he even left inscriptions on pink granite boasting of this accomplishment:

The Chalouf Stele - Louvre Paris.

The Chalouf Stele, relates to the construction of a canal that connected the river Nile and the Red Sea. The project,  finished by king Darius, was not the first of its kind: in fact, the rulers of the New Kingdom had already built a canal like this, and the list of places mentioned in the biblical book of Exodus as the route of the Jews leaving Egypt, resembles the general  direction of the canal. But although Darius merely restored an older water course, the project was very important, because  it facilitated trade between the Nile, Red Sea, and Persian Gulf.

"Saith King Darius: I am a Persian. Setting out from Persia, I conquered Egypt. I ordered this canal dug from the river called the Nile that flows in Egypt, to the sea that begins in Persia. When the canal had been dug as I ordered, ships went from Egypt through this canal to Persia, even as I intended."

The Canal of the Pharaohs continued it’s off and on existence over the next millennium. It had a major resurgence under the Ptolemys, but by Cleopatra’s reign, found itself once again blocked in places by its old enemy – sand. Then, in the 2^nd Century BC, The Roman Emperor Trajan reopened the waterway and modestly named it after himself. “Trajan’s River” remained a fixture on the maritime scene for some time to come. Even Trajan’s successor Hadrian chipped in to maintain the canal’s health, although unlike his predecessor, chose not to rename the canal, being content, one would assume, with Hadrian’s Wall. And so the canal continued operations in some form or the other all the way through to Arab rule of Egypt in the 8^th century A.D.

Then, in 770 A.D, the Abassid Caliph Abu Jafar abruptly closed the Canal. His enemies and rebels were using it to ship men and supplies from Egypt to Arabia, which he naturally did not appreciate. It is not known as to how he closed the canal. Maybe he made using the canal punishable by death. Or strung a giant chain across it’s mouth, like the one the Byzantines used to stretch across the Bosphorus.  Its more likely that he simply had the canal filled in at crucial points. Whatever he did, it was permanent. For amazingly, the Canal of the Pharaohs was never reopened after this closure. After three thousand years of survival, it now languished for good, possibly because people had finally gotten tired of digging the same trench over and over again. Or perhaps no one had the money and or the slaves to do the work. The canal slowly disappeared into the desert and by 1489, when Vasco Da Gama ‘discovered’ India, it had mostly disappeared from memory as well.

It would be another 1000 years before a canal would once again link the Red and Mediterranean seas.

Original Article by: Umesh Madan