The Suez Canal: from the pharaohs' canal to the 1956 crisis, and how to see it

What is the Suez Canal and why does it matter?

It is an artificial sea-level channel across the narrow neck of land between Africa and Asia, letting ships sail between Europe and the Indian Ocean without going around Africa. For a voyage from London to Mumbai it cuts the distance by roughly 40 per cent compared with the Cape of Good Hope.

The canal runs north–south from Port Said through Lake Timsah, where Ismailia stands, and the Great Bitter Lake to Suez. Because the two seas are at almost the same level, there are no locks; ships move in convoys, and since 2015 parallel channels allow two-way traffic along part of the route. Canal tolls are one of Egypt's largest sources of foreign currency, which is why disruptions to Red Sea shipping in recent years have hit the economy hard. Traffic levels change with world events, so treat any figure you read as a snapshot.

Did the ancient Egyptians build a Suez canal?

Yes, of a kind: the “Canal of the Pharaohs” linked the Nile to the Red Sea through the Wadi Tumilat, east of the Delta, on and off for more than a thousand years. Herodotus says the pharaoh Necho II began it around 600 BC. The Persian king Darius I finished or restored it around 500 BC and set up granite stelae along its banks in Persian, Elamite, Babylonian and Egyptian, and later Ptolemy II and the Roman emperor Trajan reopened it.

After the Arab conquest, Amr ibn al-As cleared it again to ship Egyptian grain to Arabia, and it was finally blocked in the 8th century. When Napoleon's engineers surveyed the isthmus in 1799 they wrongly concluded that the Red Sea was about 10 metres higher than the Mediterranean, so a direct canal would flood the Delta. Our guide to Napoleon in Egypt explains the expedition.

Who built the modern Suez Canal?

The French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps won a concession from Egypt's ruler Said Pasha in 1854, and his Suez Canal Company dug the canal from 1859 to 1869, largely with forced Egyptian labour in the early years. Work began at the site of Port Said on 25 April 1859.

Under the corvée system, tens of thousands of peasants at a time were drafted to dig by hand, carrying sand in baskets in brutal heat. How many died is disputed: estimates range from several thousand to Egyptian figures as high as 120,000, and the true number is unknown. In 1864, after pressure from Britain and an arbitration by Napoleon III, forced labour was ended, and steam dredgers and excavators finished the job. A freshwater canal from the Nile supplied the workers, and new towns grew along the route: Port Said, named after Said Pasha, and Ismailia, named after his successor Khedive Ismail.

How was the Suez Canal opened in 1869?

With the most extravagant party of the century: on 17 November 1869 Empress Eugénie of France led a procession of ships from Port Said on the imperial yacht L'Aigle, watched by royalty from across Europe. Khedive Ismail spent fortunes to impress his guests, building a palace on Gezira Island for the empress (now part of the Marriott hotel in Zamalek) and opening the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo that month. Verdi's Aida is often linked to the canal, but it premiered in Cairo two years later, in 1871.

The bill helped bankrupt Egypt. In 1875 Ismail sold the country's shares in the company to the British government of Benjamin Disraeli for about £4 million. Seven years later, in 1882, Britain occupied Egypt, and the canal's security became its main justification for staying. The Convention of Constantinople of 1888 declared the canal open to ships of all nations in peace and war.

What links the Suez Canal with Australia and New Zealand?

For a century the canal was the sea road between Australasia and Britain, and in both world wars Anzac troops helped defend it. Mail steamers, troopships and the liners that carried generations of Australians and New Zealanders to and from London called at Port Said, and many travellers' first sight of Egypt was the canal bank.

In February 1915 an Ottoman force crossed Sinai and tried to cross the canal, and New Zealand and Australian soldiers were among the defenders. In August 1916 the Australian Light Horse and the New Zealand Mounted Rifles fought at Romani, east of the canal, in a battle that ended the Ottoman threat to it. Our guide to the Anzacs in Egypt tells their wider story. In 1956, during the crisis below, Australia's prime minister Robert Menzies led a five-nation committee to Cairo to put the users' case to Nasser, without success.

What was the Suez Crisis of 1956?

When the United States and Britain withdrew their offer to finance the Aswan High Dam, Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956 to pay for it, and Britain, France and Israel answered with a secretly coordinated invasion. Israel attacked across Sinai on 29 October, and British and French troops landed at Port Said on 5–6 November, claiming to separate the two sides.

The United States, furious at not being consulted, used financial pressure to force a ceasefire, and a United Nations Emergency Force was sent in, the first large UN peacekeeping force. Britain's prime minister Anthony Eden resigned in January 1957. Egypt kept the canal, which reopened in April 1957 after the ships Egypt had sunk to block it were cleared. The crisis is often seen as the moment Britain's role as an imperial power ended, and it made Nasser a hero across the Arab world. At Port Said, the statue of de Lesseps was pulled from its plinth.

What has happened to the canal since?

It closed again for eight years after the 1967 war, was crossed by Egyptian forces in 1973, reopened in 1975 and has been widened and deepened repeatedly since.

• 1967–1975: the canal became the front line with Israel, and a group of cargo ships known as the Yellow Fleet sat trapped in the Great Bitter Lake for the whole closure.
• 6 October 1973: Egyptian troops crossed the canal and broke through Israel's Bar Lev Line, a date still celebrated as Armed Forces Day.
• 5 June 1975: reopening.
• August 2015: the “New Suez Canal”, a second channel of about 35 km plus deepening of existing sections, opened.
• March 2021: the container ship Ever Given ran aground and blocked the canal for six days.
• Since late 2023: attacks on shipping in the southern Red Sea led many lines to divert around Africa. At the time of writing, traffic has not been back to its earlier levels, so check the news if you plan to see the ships.

Where to see the Suez Canal today

Ismailia and Port Said make an easy long day trip from Cairo, and many travellers also cross under the canal on the road to Sinai.

• Ismailia: about 120 km and two hours from Cairo, a leafy 19th-century town on Lake Timsah, with a small museum of antiquities from the isthmus and canal-side walks where you can watch ships pass.
• Port Said: about three hours from Cairo, with the green-domed Suez Canal Authority building and old colonial balconied streets. A free public ferry crosses the canal to Port Fouad in a few minutes, the simplest way to be on the water.
• The road to Sinai: the Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel near Suez takes you beneath the canal on the drive from Cairo to St Catherine's Monastery and the south Sinai coast.
• Cairo: Khedive Ismail's Abdeen Palace recalls the ruler who opened the canal and lost it.

The canal is a strategic zone: photograph ships freely from public promenades, but never military posts or installations. Some areas east of the canal in North Sinai are subject to strict travel advice, so check Smartraveller or SafeTravel before planning a trip there.