Note 82 — Chapter XV · RAMESES THE GREAT.

Since this book was written, a further study of the subject has led me to conjecture that not Seti I, but Queen Hatshepsu (Hatasu) of the eighteenth dynasty, was the actual originator of the canal which connected the Nile with the Red Sea. The inscriptions engraved upon the walls of her great temple at Dayr-el-Baharî expressly state that her squadron sailed from Thebes to the land of Punt and returned from Punt to Thebes, laden with the products of that mysterious country which Mariette and Maspero have conclusively shown to have been situated on the Somali coast-line between Bab-el-Mandeb and Cape Guardafui. Unless, therefore, some water-way existed at that time between the Nile and the Red Sea, it follows that Queen Hatshepsu’s squadron of discovery must have sailed northward from Thebes, descended the Nile to one of its mouths, traversed the whole length of the Mediterranean sea, gone out through the pillars of Hercules, doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived at the Somali coast by way of the Mozambique Channel and the shores of Zanzibar. In other words, the Egyptian galleys would twice have made the almost complete circuit of the African continent. This is obviously an untenable hypothesis; and there remains no alternative route except that of a canal, or chain of canals, connecting the Nile with the Red Sea. The old Wady Tûmilât canal has hitherto been universally ascribed to Seti I, for no other reason than that a canal leading from the Nile to the ocean is represented on a bas-relief of his reign on the north outer wall of the great temple of Karnak; but this canal may undoubtedly have been made under the preceding dynasty, and it is not only probable, but most likely, that the great woman-Pharaoh, who first conceived the notion of venturing her ships upon an unknown sea, may also have organized the channel of communication by which those ships went forth. According to the second edition of Sir J. W. Dawson’s “Egypt and Syria,” the recent surveys conducted by Lieut.-Col. Ardagh, Maj. Spaight and Lieut. Burton, all of the royal engineers, “render it certain that this valley [i. e. the Wady Tûmilât] once carried a branch up the Nile which discharged its waters into the Red Sea” (see chap. iii. p. 55); and in such case, if that branch were not already navigable, Queen Hatshepsu would only have needed to canalize it, which is what she probably did. [Note to second edition.]