by Pat Brown
So, if she wanted to flee to India, she would have to decide how she was going to get her warships and transport ships to her Red Sea port and then determine when she could leave from there. In reality, there was only one good time to sail to India, and that was the month of August (give or take a few weeks depending on the vagaries of the weather), when the monsoon winds would drive her ships east. Since shipyards were not available on the Red Sea, she couldn’t just build a fleet of ships and have them waiting in the harbor for the wind to pick up in midsummer; she would have to bring the ships there.
With less than ten months to achieve her goal (she first had to return to Egypt, deal with her people, make plans, etc.), she had to choose between building brand-new ships or somehow getting her existing ships to Berenice. Could she build enough ships at Koptos, then have them dismantled, carried over to the port of Mersa Gawasis, and put back together for sailing to Berenice, all within ten months? Or could she break down her existing ships and then have them carried to the Red Sea and rebuilt, thereby saving a good bit of time? Or would she have to find some other way of getting her ships to the Red Sea?
What is interesting about the story of Cleopatra attempting to drag her ships through the desert is that she, for some reason, did indeed choose to do exactly that. Why? Her choice indicates it was not sensible to attempt to build new ships or to dismantle her old ships for some reason. If we look back at Pitassi’s calculations on shipbuilding, it is unlikely that Cleopatra could build more than a half dozen ships at Koptos in such a short time frame, dismantled them, and put them back together again at Berenice or Mersa Gawasis. In fact, I think six may be way too high a number. So building, breaking apart, transporting, and rebuilding new ships was not a viable option.
Her next best choice would be to shave time off the building of the ships at Koptos by breaking down the ships already in existence. This indeed could really hurry things along, except there was one major problem. Ships that have been at sea for so long and endured quite a bit of use don’t go back together again very nicely after you pull them apart. With all the warping and damage affecting the hull and the damage done while ripping the ship apart, you have a mess on your hands that isn’t going to be easily reassembled in seaworthy fashion. Repairing parts of a seaborne ship is one thing; rebuilding it is another.
Which leaves Cleopatra with little choice but to move her existing ships to the Red Sea in some other fashion. Since she chose to transport them overland on rollers, the Ptolemaic Canal must not have been any use to her upon her return from Actium. Yet it seems to have been operational after her death, so why is this? It is my belief that when the simpler method (rolling ships across the desert) failed, Cleopatra had to move on to the only possibility left: reopening the canal. Now it is possible she could have been working on two plans simultaneously, making sure that if one plan failed, the other plan was already underway as a backup. This certainly is something Cleopatra likely would have done instead of putting all her eggs in one basket. When Plan A failed at Actium, she devised Plan B. When Plan B crashed and burned on the Sinai Peninsula, I believe Cleopatra already had Plan C in the works—reopening the Ptolemaic Canal.
Some may question the ability of Cleopatra to put the old canal back into operation within nine months. Could it be done? I think so, and we must keep in mind that it is possible she had already been working on the canal for months or years prior to Actium, we just have no record of it. She may have seen into the future enough to want to increase Egypt’s Red Sea trade by making it easier to get ships from the Nile on to the Red Sea, eliminating the tiresome and likely expensive method of building, dismantling, and carrying newly built ships to the port and putting them back together again. Also, having a canal would make trade and pursuing various military strategies so much easier. Ptolemy II liked the idea of the canal, so I cannot see why Cleopatra sometime during her lifetime would not view its reopening as beneficial to the country. So she may have hurried it into operation in the nine months after Actium, or she may have already had it well underway when she returned to Egypt. For that matter, if it had been an unimpressive Nile inundation year when the floods were poor and there was a drought, maybe the canal was already operational but the water was simply too low at the time of her return from Actium for her ships to go through from September to December (when the water level should have been high enough). I think it most likely that the canal wasn’t operational and, therefore, Cleopatra simply could not sail through it. And she couldn’t repair it while the water was in the canal since the massive sludge pile would prohibit any attempt to dredge the waterway until it drained. The canal could be dredged and cleaned up from March through June when the water had finally receded.
As murky as the canal would have been for a great portion of the year, the exact months of the inundation of the Nile are murkier yet. The months when the Nile was most likely to be inundated with water seem to be from June through September, given that it takes about two months for the river to reach its highest volume of water, which means that the best time to sail one’s large ships through the canal would start in August. However, because of some variation in exact inundation times and the amount of flooding, there is a possibility that the deepest waters could occur in the month of September. It is hard to say when exactly the canal would be usable. However, if Cleopatra was looking to escape Egypt via the canal and thereby use the favorable winds to get her to India, August would likely be the month she hoped the water and wind would work together to give her the best chance to escape. The difficulty for Cleopatra was not knowing ahead of time exactly what day would be the first she could safely move her ships into the canal and on to the Red Sea.
The canal is an interesting part of Egyptian history. It was an ingenious attempt by the Egyptians to bridge the Mediterranean and the Red Sea (by way of the Nile) in the only reasonable way possible prior to the building of the Suez Canal. The beginning of the canal starts thirty-nine miles northeast of Cairo, if you follow the eastern Nile branch toward the sea to the town of Bubastis, known today by the name Zagazig. I set off to see the area, knowing full well there was no canal in existence today. I wanted to stand at that spot and look eastward, to imagine the ships making their way along the canal from the Nile to Lake Timsah, where they would then turn south and sail through the Bitter Lakes to Cleopatris at the northern end of the Herooplite Gulf that leads to the Red Sea.
It is a short train ride from Cairo’s main train station, Ramses, to Zagazig, so I grabbed a taxi early in the morning to go catch one of the many trains that left fairly often heading in that direction. When I arrived, the train station was still under construction, but I managed to make my way to a ticket office where I attempted to purchase a ticket. Soon I was repeating history, struggling to locate my train platform as I had on my journey to Alexandria.
“Zagazig,” I said to the woman behind the window.
“Not here. Platform 2.” She waved me off.
I went to Platform 2’s ticket window. “Zagazig.”
“Platform 4.”
I went to Platform 4. “Zagazig.”
“Platform 8.”
I went to Platform 8. “Zagazig.”
“Platform 2.” Now, I was stumped.
I tried for the next hour repeating the name of the town, pointing to the name in my guide book, scurrying back from platform to platform. I finally gave up and went to breakfast.
Sadly, I never did make it to Zagazig. Perhaps my failure to reach the canal was my way of following Cleopatra’s own path through history; she never made it there, either.
The concept of a canal from Bubastis on the Nile to the Red Sea might seem like a bad idea to some: the problem being the lack of water in the canal for a number of months of the year, which would certainly make it impossible for large ships with any keel of measurable depth to pass through. Only during four months of the year, from August through November (or September through December), in accordance with the Nile inundation, w
ould the canal fill up enough to provide sufficient depth for seagoing vessels to sail from the Nile through to the Bitter Lakes and on into the Red Sea. On the other hand, four months is better than no months for military and economic reasons, and there is certainly evidence in history that such a canal was desirable even if it had limited use and tended to silt up if it was not tended to continuously. The Wadi Tumilat, the area through which the canal was built, saw a constant flow of people and donkeys as they moved goods from the Red Sea to the Nile and vice versa. It was a practical idea to have a canal that would allow people to move goods in a much easier manner. Since Upper Egypt was a land full of canals that were traversed by shallow-bottom boats, which served as an important manner of transport in the country for centuries, it would be no surprise that the Egyptians should consider a longer and deeper canal and indeed construct one (they certainly had the manpower) along a well-traveled route that would allow for ships of all sizes—warships, large transport ships, and many smaller boats—to facilitate trade and aid in national defense.
There are a number of references to the canal being built and used prior to the reign of Cleopatra VII. It is said to have had its beginnings with Pharaoh Necho in 600 BCE, who supposedly started making the canal a reality. Apparently he did not finish it; Darius I, the Persian emperor, completed it one hundred years later in 500 BCE. It was 62 miles long (37½ miles from Bubastis to the Bitter Lakes and 24½ miles more down to Cleopatris) and 164 feet across (wide enough for two triremes to sail side by side), and it took four days for ships to make it from one end to the other. Upon completion of the canal, monuments were erected with the inscription:
A great god is Ahurumazda who has created these heavens, who has created this earth, who has created the humans, who has created the well-being for man, who has created King Darius, who has given Darius the Great Kingship with beautiful horses and men.
“I, Darius, Great King, king of kings, king of the countries of all languages, king of the wide and far-off earth, son of Hystaspes the Achaemenid. Darius King says: I, the Persian, with the Persian (soldiers), have taken Egypt. I gave the order to dig this stream from the river which is in Egypt (Piru is its name) to the River Amer Sea which comes out of Persia. This stream was dug as I have ordered, and the vessels journeyed on this stream from Egypt to Persia, as I have ordered.”1
Interesting as it is that the canal was constructed and was operational, what is of even more significance is the statement of Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (first century BCE) that the canal was managed by Ptolemy II and was very active, a major traffic artery for the next two centuries.2 In fact, he states that Darius I actually did not finish the canal because he feared the saltwater of the Bitter Lakes would come into the canal and back into the freshwater Nile and so he gave up completing it; and that it was actually Ptolemy II who figured out that a lock was needed, and he constructed one on the eastern end, which made the canal a workable waterway. Ptolemy II made the port that the Romans later used at Cleopatris (also known as Arsinoe).
An artificial canal leads from the Pelusian arm to the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea. The first attempt to construct this was made by Necho, the son of Psamtik; The Persian Darius continued the work up to a certain point, but, finally, did not finish it, as he was told that the piercing of the isthmus would cause an inundation of the whole of Egypt, it being proven to him that the Red Sea was more elevated than Egypt. Later Ptolemy II finished the canal, and ordered a lock constructed with much artifice to be built at the most appropriate place. This he had opened before and closed quickly after every passage, thus never leaving it open longer than was necessary. The canal is called Ptolemy after its builder, and at its exit lies a city called Arsinoe.3
There is further commentary stating that parts of the canal were blocked by sand during Cleopatra’s life and that it was the Roman emperor Trajan (98-117 CE) who cleared the silt and put it back into use. Hadrian, the next emperor, dredged it also and sent his fleet through to the Red Sea to conquer Nabatea and kept it functional as well during his reign (117-138 CE).4
So the canal seems to have been used for many a year from the time of Darius I (or at least Ptolemy II) well into the Roman Era, which proves to me that there is no reason to believe Cleopatra could not have had the canal in use during her reign or was not attempting to put it into use at the time of her death. The simple fact that a few years after her death, two hundred Roman ships appear at the canal’s eastern end attests to my theory of Cleopatra likely having the canal operational and ready for use in moving her ships to the Red Sea.
But then the question would be, if this is so, why did she waste time dragging her ships over the Isthmus, and why didn’t her ships ever make it to the Red Sea before Octavian invaded Egypt? I believe the problem lies not in Cleopatra’s failure to have the canal finished in time, but in that she had to wait until the Nile inundation filled the canal satisfactorily enough to get let ships through.
In other words, Cleopatra really needed Octavian to stay away from Egypt until August. If he had left Rome a month later, history might have turned out very differently.
I returned to Alexandria. As I stood on the dock staring past the colorful fishing boats floating tranquilly in the harbor, I thought of Octavian over on the other shore in Italy. Cleopatra must have stood on this very same spot wondering just how soon her enemy would push off his shores and come to destroy her. Cleopatra knew that, like a cancerous brain tumor that needed to be cut from his head, Octavian would need to remove her from his mind and his world with a swift and lethal blow.
The motive for Octavian’s murder of Cleopatra is quite clear. This woman dared to create an heir with Julius Caesar (whether or not that heir was truly his biological child); joined with his enemy, Antony, to wage battle against him; and, most outrageously, continued to mock him with her existence and her incredible wealth. And, even though Cleopatra and Antony were badly beaten at Actium and fled to Egypt in mid-battle, Octavian knew she would never give up. She might retreat temporarily, but she would never surrender. If she fled, she would be back. He would have to march on Egypt and destroy her, along with her Roman general and her royal line. Only in this way could Octavian ever hope to be the last man standing and in total control of the Roman Empire.
Back in Egypt, after she failed to drag her ships across the Sinai Desert to the Red Sea, Cleopatra could do nothing but wait and hope that the Nile inundation would come before Octavian did. Meanwhile, she continued building her Caesarium and taxing her people. She didn’t let on that as soon as the canal waters rose, she would be absconding with her fleet and her treasure; it wouldn’t do her any good if word got out that she expected to lose the war if Egypt was invaded.
It might seem that she was deserting her people like a captain jumping a sinking ship and leaving his men aboard (as some say she and Antony did at Actium), but staying with her people only to be humiliated and then executed while the conqueror took control of her entire military and all her riches would hardly do much for the country anyway. It is far better to retreat for the time being, allow the victor to quietly take control of your country and then return with a vengeance when the time is right and win back your land. Cleopatra’s plan to leave was not one of cowardice; it was simply expedient. In fact, many of the Ptolemies—and even Cleopatra herself—had left Egypt when someone had managed to take over the throne and the ruler’s life was threatened. They fled, they waited, they gathered forces, and they returned when the time was right to recapture their title of pharaoh. If one simply allowed oneself to be killed, the dynasty might end right there, but if one survived to fight another day, the Ptolemaic line would continue. Cleopatra seemed to be behaving as any Ptolemy would.
Then Cleopatra received horrific news. Octavian was on his way even though winter was barely over. Unless he was detained along the way or took ill, he would reach Egypt before the Nile floods. If he arrived before August, her only hope would be that her general at Pelusium could withstan
d a siege that might keep Octavian busy long enough for the rains to come and the Nile to rise; and then she could rush her fleet to the canal and get through it before he was any the wiser. I am sure she wished she could have already had her fleet in place on the Nile where the canal begins, waiting for the moment the waterway filled sufficiently, but the Nile route was most likely one that Octavian would choose to advance his armies toward Alexandria (as did Alexander before him), and it would end Cleopatra’s plans if she were caught like a sitting duck with her fleet bunched up at the canal entrance.
Apparently, either her general sold out, gave up, or simply could not withstand Octavian’s forces. Pelusium fell in a day. Plutarch writes:
Accordingly, the war was suspended for the time being; but when the winter was over, Caesar again marched against his enemy through Syria, and his generals through Libya. When Pelusium was taken there was a rumour that Seleucus had given it up, and not without the consent of Cleopatra; but Cleopatra allowed Antony to put to death the wife and children of Seleucus.1
Plutarch certainly got a dig in at Cleopatra, insinuating that she purposely had her general give up Pelusium in order to gain favor from Octavian and then was so nasty that she had his family murdered to make it look like he had betrayed her and not the other way around. I doubt that this was at all true, considering how important it was to keep Octavian occupied at the border and that Cleopatra knew full well that no favors were going to sway Octavian from having her eliminated. More likely, the claim that she murdered Seleucus’s family is a Plutarch fabrication, or it could be that Cleopatra was really angry at Seleucus for doing such a bad job of protecting the border. It could also be that Seleucus simply surrendered to save his own skin, which would have unquestionably sent Cleopatra over the edge.
