Dear Peter,Maybe that is because of the route they took (which had to be nearly straight), or because they needed to dig 9 metres below sea level. Darius, and perhaps others before him, were able to build a canal from the Bitter Lakes to the Red Sea without the aid of dynamite. Anyway, http://www.nrzam.org.uk/Site%20Resources/UnionCastle_odds/SuezCanalSouth.jpg suggests that Shalluf (Chalouf) is very near where I viewed the canal, and this was not rocky high ground.
Thankyou for your most interesting explantion on the term "wall of water,"
(especially Nahum 3:8) suggesting it need not necessarily be as portrayed in
Cecile B. DeMille's Exodus movie with Charlton Heston as Moses (a stirring
movie !).
As regards the flat alluvial plain of the Isthmus of Suez, if I recall
rightly there is an elevation called Shalluf between the Bitter Lakes and
the Bay Clysma sits on. For the Red Sea (Gulf of Suez) to "naturally flow"
into the Bitter Lakes it would have to overcome this barrier. It proved a
hard nut to crack for the builders of the canal under deLesseps, who used a
lot of dynamite on it to blast his way through to the Red Sea. ...
... For the Red
Sea to be high enough in antiquity to reach the Bitter Lakes as suggested by
Professors Kitchen and Hoffmeier, the 18th/19th dynasty Egyptian seaport of
Tell el Merkha on the west shore of the Sinai Peninsula, near the shore,
would have had to have been UNDER WATER, no such evidence exist that it was
ever under water. ...
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