EFFORTPOST Detailed explanation of why the Red Sea was strategically important before the Suez Canal turns into focus group about why the frick you people are actually reading this

[You're probably here because you got pinged, which means you're in a ping group, which means you have nothing else going on in your life so you can participate in this experiment. When you drop out of the historical part, come down to the second part and give me some feedback about exactly when you were bored to death pls. If you've been pinged and feel it was wrongful, consult the appropriate part of the document.]

The Red Sea actually was important going way way back. I'm pretty sure the Egyptians were doing substantial trade through it but I'm not an ancient Egypt guy so don't quote me on that. When the Persian Empire ( btw) was in power they had a canal built from the Nile to the Bitter Lakes and then the Red Sea. Usually I don't believe in these claimed ancient feats of engineering but there's actually pretty substantial archaeological evidence that this actually happened. Way more than we have for other contemporary events like the Persians invading Greece. Other stuff in Herodotus about the Persians that was previously doubted by effete homosexual European "classicists" in the 1800s was proven true by the Behistun Inscription so you have to at least take him seriously. And the Persians are said to have built at least two other important canals extremely fast in military operations. One version of the story of their conquest of Babylon involves a canal. (I'm going to @Patriarch the next time I need water diverted. (Actually I just realized I had an Iranian friend who is like one of the world's leading experts on that. Too late to make a joke about it other than parentheses.))

And there's that time in 460 BC when the Athenians sent a huge fleet into the Nile Delta and got bogged down besieging some place. The Persians cut a canal that diverted the water away so their fleet was left floating on nothing but sand and had to surrender. This was one of the biggest disasters in the history of Athens with like 10,000 guys getting captured but the only google results I'm getting are very brief oblique references to it. For some reason, despite Marathon and Salamis and Thermopylae and Plataea being endlessly jerked off about, the times when the Persians won massive victories over Greeks are virtually never written about. Or that one time when almost all of Greece formally surrendered and became part of the Persian Empire for a while. Curious. Anyway you can see for yourself in Thucydides 1.109-110. IIRC the Athenians had to make a bunch of concessions in exchange for getting their prisoners back, but that is a really really long and complicated book and I'm not slogging through it again to find that unless one of you gives me some adderall. !druggies

Imagine it's this but with a Persian cat.

Anyway, back to the Red Sea, there are reports of this canal being operational on and off during the Ptolemaic and Roman eras. And the Arabs digging a separate canal.

But even more importantly than that, you could always just bring stuff to Egypt and unload it and carry it a short distance and then load it back onto a ship on the other sea. Like the French Canadian fur trappers having a portage between rivers. The city of Berenice in an inhospitable desert was thriving in Ptolemaic and Roman times. !leafs

(And probably earlier too. Every one of these cities "founded by the Greeks" that I've looked into closely turns out to have already existed. One particularly laughable example is the Alexandria in Egypt, supposedly designed by Alexander on a whim drawing in the sand. Not even a napkin. There was already a city there. I mean ffs I'm pretty confident of that because it plays a major role in the Odyssey when some crooked customs officers impounds his ship and demands a bribe to release it.)

(@Aevann Egyptian jannies ruled everything even in prehistoric mythical times. The only difference is nobody can defeat you.)

Later on the canals fell out of use. I don't know why but I can imagine a number of factors. Maybe it's some geological thing where too much silt built up in the wrong places and they couldn't dredge it. Some of the greatest cities in the world like Ephesus and Bruges went into decline this way. Maybe there was more competition from the Silk Road. There's people who know way more than me about that era in that region and economic history and I hope one of comments here. (Or if you're some random tard just make up a story, like that kid who wrote the wiktionary for the Scottish language.)

(!neolibs I admit I'm leaning quite a bit on Braudel of all people because this isn't my area. I at least find what he's saying in really broad strokes to be plausible even if the "France is an innocent victim, it was the roving Jews who made us frick up everything story doesn't hold water with me.) And I'm an inveterate francophile from birth. !francais)

But you still see the importance of these routes of these Mediterranean -> camel trip across Egypt -> Red Sea routes throughout the medieval era. You couldn't carry heavy, bulky goods like grain, but stuff that had a very high ratio of value to weight were still profitable. Like silk and spices.

(Remember that the extremely complicated process of keeping silkworms alive and exploiting the silk only gradually spread westward through corporate espionage, from China to Persia to etc. After a very long time it actually became very important in the economies of places you wouldn't think of, like Lebanon and southern France. But in the 1800s disease wiped out the industry in most of world. (It was kinda like the Phylloxera epidemic that wiped out inferior eurotrash rootstock, so now almost all eurotrash wine is made from American rootstock. Reminds me of that time when Airbus couldn't build a plane without using Boeing planes to fly the parts around.) Japan managed to not get infected and became the primary silk producer of the world, an often overlooked factor in it having enough foreign exchange to modernize.)

Even during the Crusades we know there was trade going on between Egypt and Europe because whiners in Europe were banning it and begging merchants to please at least not sell them materials they can make weapons out of. And even later into the Modern Era (1500s+) after euros were capable of getting around the Cape of Good Hope and bypassing Africa altogether, the route through Egypt and the Red Sea was still important for communications. You could send a message between Europe and Asia faster, and more specifically between Britain and India which became very important by the 1800s. And if you think hauling freight is lucrative, hauling data is even more lucrative. (!codecels I'm pinging you because I pray to God your education began with learning about guys like Baudot and Claude Shannon and you understand the fundamental relationship between telecommunications and computers. )

So yes, the Red Sea was important long before the Suez Canal. Oh yeah, and before I go, did you ever wonder why it's called the Red Sea? You might think it's because the first time an angloid went there it was sunset. No, this actually goes way way back. For some reason it's always been called that. And in ancient times the Persian Gulf was also called the "Red Sea". And you notice there's also the Black Sea that's always been called that in most languages. One theory that I tend to agree with is that for some reason humans tend to associate cardinal directions with colors. The funny thing is you see this crop up all the time all over the world, it's a very common thing, but there seems to be no pattern to which color gets assigned to which direction.

Uh... that's nice bro...

[This started out as me replying to an incredibly ignorant comment by @TournamentFishing saying that the Red Sea wasn't of strategic importance before the Suez Canal. I got butthurt and had a lot to say about that. Now usually I would realize that nobody wants to hear my neurodivergent rambling about stuff I read 20 years ago, but everyone has been mysteriously so nice to me the last few days, I thought I'd try just going all out posting what I want to. I'm trying in some ways to emulate that British guy who did the show Connections back in boomer times and my dad when he would go on one of these really long didactic monologues where you'd actually be at rapt attention and then ask us to figure out the answer about some topic like why giant insects (Btw the answer is that because of the Surface-area-to-volume ratio their muscles will overheat. Not enough air flowing over them.) The links with (hopefully) humorous text I got from Encyclopedia Dramatica.

The extremely shameless self-indulgence I got from Countess LuAnn de Lesseps from Real Housewives of New York, who is very relevant to this story as she used to be married to the descendant of the guy who built the Suez Canal. And gloated about it to everyone every day until they got divorced. AWWWWWWKWARD!!! !biofoids But seriously, I'm like any animal, I respond to rewards. And when I look at what I'm getting rewarded for with upmarseys it's me ranting about some obscure historical thing that I care about because it's my autism and whining about my personal medical problems. This is the complete opposite what people should care about. I don't know how you f-slurs tick sometimes.

The parts where I call people r-slurred cute twinks, I learned that from you.

The nested parentheses I got from an incredibly obscure MUD (Terrafrore) about roleplaying an animal in Siberia that I was on briefly as a kid. I was really interested in animal behavior at that time so I thought this is a great place for me. In retrospect I have to wonder if these people were therians or furries. (To my credit, the undisputed best dramanaut of all time (!oldstrags know exactly who I mean) had similar experiences at the same time.) But what was really fricking bizarre about this situation was that the entire MUD was made in LISP. Must have been some college kid doing it to educate himself (this is most MUDs) but it educated me about LISP. Trying to just be a goddarn European Wildcat, the most vanilla thing possible, I'm trying to just describe my den and (it (is (so (fricking (complicated (to (even (enter (the (simplest (data (structures (because of (the fricking (parentheses, the bane of every programmers existance (even in languages where they're just used normally. !furries

Oh yeah, and I noticed that if I ping people !pinggrouplovers !pingkings !pings I have literally never had anyone complain about it. Actually I probably did but I forgot about it which is the same thing.

I was brought up to believe that being attention-seeking was a really bad sin. But when I observe people's souls bared through social media I realize that attention is what really drives the world. People pay money, choose to take drugs or not, ruin relationships with their family, for attention because attention is more important than any of those things. And I'm the first honest person who is just gonna admit it.]