The Suez Canal is one of the most important waterways in the world.

The 101-mile waterway connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea.
The Suez Canal is often called the “crossroads of Europe, Africa, and
Asia" because the route is used to transport goods to and from all three
continents.

The idea of connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea is as old
as the pharaohs. The first canal in the region seems to have been dug
about 1850 BC, but many
attempts to complete the task
failed. Desert winds blew into
the canal and clogged it. About
150 years ago, Great Britain had
a thriving trade with India, but
without a canal, British ships
had to make a long journey
around the entire continent of
Africa. A canal through the
Isthmus of Suez would cut the
journey by 6,000 miles. An
isthmus is a narrow strip of
land connecting two larger
pieces of land.

A French company led by

Ferdinand deLesseps made a deal with Egypt to build the Suez Canal.
After ten years of work, the canal opened in 1869. The Egyptian ruler,
Ismail, celebrated by building a huge palace in Cairo. Ismail treated
royalty from around the world to a celebration in honor of the new canal.
The heavy spending for the celebration came at a time when the price of
Egyptian cotton plunged. Egypt had gone into debt to pay for the Suez
Canal. Ismail took out loans from European banks, but he was unable to
repay them. Egypt was forced to sell the canal to Great Britain. Soon after,
the British sent soldiers into Egypt, saying they were concerned for their
property. For many years, the English controlled the Suez Canal.

In 1956, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the canal and
declared it to be the property of the Egyptian people. Britain France, and
Israel invaded Egypt, but the United Nations ordered them to leave and
decreed the Suez Canal to be the property of Egypt.

Egypt fought three bitter wars with Israel during this period, and denied
Israel the use of the waterway. Egypt and Israel agreed to
a peace treaty in 1979, and since then the Suez Canal has
been open to every nation.

The canal closed for eight years in 1967 after Egypt lost a disastrous six-day war with Israel. After
the war, Israel controlled the Sinai Peninsula, which includes the east bank of the canal. The canal
reopened in 1975 after tensions cooled. Egypt and Israel agreed to a peace treaty in four years later.
Today the Suez Canal is open to every nation.
th
http://www.mrdowling.com/607-suez.html Accessed: January 4 , 2011
The biggest single change on the Nile in all its history was the building of the Aswan's dam in Egypt. It took ten years to build
and was completed in 1970.
The Dam is 114 meters high and 3.6 kilometers long. Upstream, it creates a reservoir of water, called Lake Nasser, which
stretches back for 270 kilometers into northern Sudan. Before the reservoir was made, the land was the home of 100,000
farming people who had to be given new houses and land, irrigated from the lake, above the new water level.

Controlling the Flood

The most important change that the Dam brought about was that it made the annual flooding of the Nile valley in Egypt
a thing of the past. The floodwaters are now trapped in Lake Nasser behind the dam, and their flow into the valley can be
controlled. This has enabled more land in the valley to be irrigated, partly to feed Egypt's growing population, which
doubled from 14 to 28 million between 1925 and 1950. (It had doubled again by 1995 and is expected to reach 68 million by
the year 2000.) Egypt also needed more land for crops that could be exported, such as cotton and fruit. The High Dam was
also designed to meet Egypt's other urgent need as its leaders tried to modernize the country energy. By the 1980s, the
generators driven by water flowing through the dam were providing half of Egypt's electricity, but by the 1990s this
proportion had fallen as energy demands grew.

Plus And Minus

The Dam was a successful project, giving Egypt and northern Sudan extra farmland and providing electricity for Egyptian
cities. Lake Nasser has created a flourishing fishing industry, which produces 25,000 tons of fish a year and has a target of
100,000 tons by the year 2000.
But some other results of the project are not so good. Silt from the Nile is held back behind the dam, and experts say that
over the next 100 years Lake Nasser will steadily fill with silt. If this happens, the water level would rise and the lake would
overflow, making new irrigation work urgently necessary. Some experts even fear that the weight of sediment could
eventually break the dam, which would bring major disaster to Egypt, with huge damage and loss of life. Meanwhile, as
much as ten per cent of the water flowing into Lake Nasser is lost through evaporation into the dry, hot air. This is water
Egypt cannot afford to lose. In the valley below Aswan, the dam has altered the Egyptians' traditional way of farming. The
building of this dam solved some of Egypt's immediate problems, but may have stored up others for the future. Extract from
“Great Rivers: The Nile”. Written by Michael Pollard, London, Evans Brothers Limited, 1997.

http://www.egyptattraction.com/aswan-dam-egypt.html Accessed: January 4th, 2011

 The ancient
Egyptians
enjoyed many
natural barriers.
There were
deserts to the
east and west of
the Nile River,
and mountains to
the south. This
isolated the
ancient
Egyptians and
allowed them to
develop a truly distinctive culture.

The Nile is the world's longest river. It is over 4000 miles long! The Nile River flows
northward toward the Mediterranean Sea from Victoria Lake. It is shaped like the
lotus flower so often seen in ancient Egyptian art. Each spring, water would run off
the mountains and the Nile would flood. As the flood waters receded, black rich
(black land) fertile soil was left behind. The ancient Egyptian called this rich soil The
Gift of the Nile.

Fertile soil for crops was not the Nile's only gift. The Nile gave the ancient Egyptians
many gifts. Thanks to the Nile, these ancient people had fresh water for drinking and
bathing. The Nile supported transportation and trade. It provided materials for
building, for making cloth for clothes, and even for making paper - made from the
wild papyrus weed, that grew along the shores of the Nile.

Because of the annual flooding of the Nile, the ancient Egyptians enjoyed a high
standard of living compared to other ancient civilizations. Without the Nile, Egypt
would be a desert which they called red land.
http://egypt.mrdonn.org/geography.html Acessed: January 4th, 2o11