Editing Suez Canal (section)

=== Receding Red Sea and the dwindling Nile ===
The [[Red Sea]] is believed by some [[historian]]s to have gradually receded over the centuries, its coastline slowly moving southward away from [[Lake Timsah]]<ref name="Columbia"/><ref name="Naville"/> and the Great Bitter Lake.<ref name="Britannica"/><ref name="Rappoport"/> Coupled with persistent accumulations of Nile [[silt]], maintenance and repair of Ptolemy's canal became increasingly cumbersome over each passing century.

Two hundred years after the construction of Ptolemy's canal, [[Cleopatra VII|Cleopatra]] seems to have had no west–east waterway passage,<ref name="Britannica"/><ref name="Rappoport"/> because the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, which fed Ptolemy's west–east canal, had by that time dwindled, being choked with silt.<ref name="Britannica"/><ref name="Rappoport"/> In support of this contention one can note that in 31 BCE, during a reversal of fortune in [[Mark Antony]]'s and Cleopatra's war against [[Octavian]], she attempted to escape Egypt with her fleet by raising the ships out of the Mediterranean and dragging them across the isthmus of Suez to the Red Sea. Then, according to [[Plutarch]], the [[Arab]]s of [[Petra]] attacked and burned the first wave of these ships and Cleopatra abandoned the effort.<ref>Plutarch, "Life of Antony", 69.</ref> (Modern historians, however, maintain that her ships were burned by the enemy forces of [[Malichus I]].)<ref>Burstein, Stanley M. (2004), ''The Reign of Cleopatra'', Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, {{ISBN|978-0-313-32527-4}}, p.31.</ref><ref>Roller, Duane W. (2010), ''Cleopatra: a Biography'', Oxford: Oxford University Press, {{ISBN|978-0-19-536553-5}}, p. 142.</ref>