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Trajan's Canal (Canal of the Pharaohs, restored)
About
Trajan reopened the old Nile-to-Red-Sea waterway first cut under the Pharaohs and renamed it after himself. Engineers moved its Nile mouth south to a new stone-lined intake at Babylon fortress, walls six meters thick and forty meters apart, whose footings still sit under Cairo's Coptic churches. The channel ran through the Wadi Tumilat to the Red Sea port of Clysma, sparing Arabian and Indian cargo the long overland haul to Alexandria. Barges were already working the restored route by the time Trajan died in 117 CE.
What happened here
Cut to shorten a journey, to bypass a river mouth that silts, or to drain ground that floods. Digging is done by soldiers or by contracted labour in seasons when the water is low, and the spoil is banked along the sides to make a towpath. Barges are hauled by men or oxen, moving grain, stone, timber and wine at a fraction of the cost of the same distance by road. Sluices control the level where the canal meets a tidal river. Maintenance is endless — silt, weed and collapsed banks — and a canal that is not dredged returns to marsh within a generation. Towns along it grow fast, and the tolls charged at each end are worth having.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →