Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c10.4.1

c10.4.1

The ancient port of Naukratis had been comparatively neglected in favour of Tyre by the Oriental traders, owing to the long and perilous desert-journey between the Nile and the Red Sea. For the greater part of the year it was so intensely hot that the caravans had to move at night, guiding themselves across the trackless sands by means of stars, and carrying their own water-supply, like mariners, says Strabo¹. Early attempts to remedy this by means of a canal between the two waterways had been made from time to time. The first attempt of this kind was due to a Sesostris of the twentieth century B.C. Pharaoh Necho and Darius the Great², and finally Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246 B.C.), revived the idea. The latter built a large port at Arsinoe, the modern Suez, for the purpose. Owing, however, to the dangerous nature of the navigation of the Heroopolite Gulf, with its shoals and treacherous winds and currents, the scheme had finally to be abandoned¹, and it was left to the genius of De Lesseps in our own times to carry it into effect. Merchants preferred to take their goods to Aelana², the ancient Ezion Geber, whence they were transported to the great emporium of Petra, and thence to the Levantine ports. Ptolemy now reverted to the old idea of a port on the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea, connected with the Nile by a desert-road furnished with convenient oases.