Could Augustus have had a canal built across the Suez? Should he have?

[grumbler]

Seems like even if an emperor did want to built he canal, getting the labor there, keeping it productive, and then maintaining the canal once it got built could have caused a severe economic recession.

How? Augustus already had 10,000 legionaries in theater. Instead of ordering them to invade Yemen on a shoe string logistical line, order them to dig the Suez. They get paid either way. Same with food and supplies.

Much cheaper to maintain this canal than the canal of the Pharaohs since no locks are involved and you don't have to deal with the floods of the Nile.

The roughly 10,000 men under Gallus were not 10,000 legionaries.  They were about 5000 legionaries and 5,000 auxiliaries.

So, if Augustus decides to build the canal with the Gallus legion, it's going to take something like 20 years. 

Or they can have the auxiliaries dig too. Or hire workers from Egypt. Or conscript some Egyptian peasants, or bring in some slaves. Lots of options.

Now you are back to the original premise, and away from your contention that the cost of the canal labor would be noting more than the cost of maintaining the legions anyway.

[jimmy olsen]

Well, the auxiliaries are like the Legionaries already being paid, fed and housed so there's not really a change in costs if they're digging instead of on campaign against Yemen.

Slaves, also always need to be fed and housed. There is an opportunity cost here, if they're digging, they're not doing something else instead. They need to be transported to the Suez as well, but the everyday maintenance costs for them should be the same as usual.

[Threviel]

The Romans were not idiots, if the Suez canal had been that easy they would have done it. 10 000 soldiers cannot spend 20 years just digging a canal, they have soldier stuff to do, otherwise they might as well be stationed somewhere else.

The Ottomans had even more reasons and possibly more resources to build it and they deemed it too expensive.

And to quote wiki about the building of the Suez canal:

"The excavation took some 10 years, with forced labour (corvée) being employed until 1864 to dig out the canal.[57] Some sources estimate that over 30,000 people were working on the canal at any given period, that more than 1.5 million people from various countries were employed,[49][58] and that tens of thousands of labourers died, many of them from cholera and similar epidemics."

And that is with 19th century technology and resources. One benefit of that is probably steam barges drastically lessening the need for draught animals and food for them. Other benefits are probably more steel and iron tools, things that go boom, better food preservation techniques and so on and so forth.

So yeah, the Romans could have done it and the Ottomans could have done it. Neither of them presumably deemed it worth it and they were probably right until the much richer and more sophisticated 19th century states were able to finance it. Or not, to quote wiki again:

"Although numerous technical, political, and financial problems had been overcome, the final cost was more than double the original estimate."

[Richard Hakluyt]

I think that the absence of bulk trade (in the Red sea and Indian ocean) in Roman times is important. The imports were of high value goods, moving them by camel train appears to have cost about 8% of the value of the cargo in the ship that Minsky mentioned. If the goods had been less high value then this figure would be higher. As it is, if the Romans had built the canal, how much could they extract from fees to use it? I'm also wondering about the nature of the sailing vessels use in the Indian ocean at that time; they might have found the passage of a canal driven through desert quite difficult. I don't think it is mere coincidence that the canal was finally built in the steam age; and even then the financial aspects were heavily questioned at the time.

         

[Valmy]

Wait, didn't the Romans already have a canal from the Red Sea to the Nile?

The Pharaohs (allegedly) did.

I thought the Ptolemies did. They needed to invent a way to keep the salt water out of the Nile and some fancy Greek engineers came up with something.

I knew it was silted over by the time of the Arabic conquest but I was not sure when that happened.

[Maladict]

"Although numerous technical, political, and financial problems had been overcome, the final cost was more than double the original estimate."

That's pretty good by modern standards 

The Romans built plenty of (long) canals, sure they could have done it if they had wanted to.
Also, a lot of goods imported from the East were luxury items like spices, not heavy goods or massive quantities that you can't load onto an animal or cart.
And sea transport was still very slow going, adding a few days of overland transport would not have mattered all that much.

edit: RH got there before me

[Josquius]

It does strike me you'd need a significant change in rimes relationship with the red sea and beyond to make them do this rather than to expect a canal to be an impetus for the changed relationship.
Things like canals are built when there is a need, not in the hope they will create a need.

[PDH]

No way, Augustus was way more practical than that.  There is the expense, the real lack of need, the fact that the imports were not bulk, the notion that having too many soldiers in one place was a good breeding ground for revolt...and the knowledge that had he done so, some idiot would lodge something like Caligula's Giant Ship against one bank 2 millennia before tugboats were around.

[grumbler]

Well, the auxiliaries are like the Legionaries already being paid, fed and housed so there's not really a change in costs if they're digging instead of on campaign against Yemen.

Slaves, also always need to be fed and housed. There is an opportunity cost here, if they're digging, they're not doing something else instead. They need to be transported to the Suez as well, but the everyday maintenance costs for them should be the same as usual.

No, the auxilia were provided by Egypt, Nabataea, and Judea in return for a share of the spoils.  They'd likely revolt if forced to become common laborers, or their leaders would withdraw them.

Slaves need guards, overseers, food, housing, etc, plus are much less efficient than hired labor.  They are not going to build the canal more cheaply.

[Malthus]

Not clear on what is different between the ancient canal that was actually built, and the proposed canal. Different route, not using a canal lock?

[grumbler]

Not clear on what is different between the ancient canal that was actually built, and the proposed canal. Different route, not using a canal lock?

Different route, and navigable year-round.  The changing height of the Nile over the course of the year made building a year-round canal impossible.  The lock was needed to keep the tides in the Red Sea from pushing salt water into the Nile.

The route was actually the same from the Great Bitter lake to the Red Sea. 

[Malthus]

Not clear on what is different between the ancient canal that was actually built, and the proposed canal. Different route, not using a canal lock?

Different route, and navigable year-round.  The changing height of the Nile over the course of the year made building a year-round canal impossible.  The lock was needed to keep the tides in the Red Sea from pushing salt water into the Nile.

The route was actually the same from the Great Bitter lake to the Red Sea.

I wonder how the seasonal use of the canal meshed with the monsoon.

My recollection is that, until modern times, navigation to India was also a seasonal affair, dictated by the yearly monsoon; if the existing canal was usable at the right time to accommodate the seasonal round of the India trade, that may have been good enough for their purposes.

Though I readily admit, I don't know enough about the timing of these two events.

[Razgovory]

In defense of Timmay, building a canal isn't that stupid of an idea.  Europeans would build forts all over the coast of Africa to get access to the Indian Ocean 1500 years later.  I do think that that the existence of a working canal probably was a factor in the decision not to build a new canal.  The situation is somewhat similar to the idea of a canal through Thailand to avoid the straits of Malacca.  A very high cost for a fairly moderate gain.

Still, trying to expand militarily into the Red Sea is just asking for trouble.  Large armies with ambitious generals in rich lands with only sporadic contact with the central authority is why they had civil war in the first place.

[jimmy olsen]

Not clear on what is different between the ancient canal that was actually built, and the proposed canal. Different route, not using a canal lock?

Different route, and navigable year-round.  The changing height of the Nile over the course of the year made building a year-round canal impossible.  The lock was needed to keep the tides in the Red Sea from pushing salt water into the Nile.

The route was actually the same from the Great Bitter lake to the Red Sea.

I wonder how the seasonal use of the canal meshed with the monsoon.

My recollection is that, until modern times, navigation to India was also a seasonal affair, dictated by the yearly monsoon; if the existing canal was usable at the right time to accommodate the seasonal round of the India trade, that may have been good enough for their purposes.

Though I readily admit, I don't know enough about the timing of these two events.

Trade with India would have remained seasonal, but trade with Africa, Arabia and even Persia would have been year round as those ships were just hugging the coast.

The canal would have allowed ships from all those places direct access to the cities of the Mediterranean. And Roman dominion of the Red Sea would have removed the threat of piracy.

Anyways, while beneficial for those reasons in the long term, the main short term motivation for an Emperor to build such a canal was strategic. It allows the robust supply of expeditions of conquest against the rich city states and kingdoms on the coast.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Maybe, that kind of long term planning would not relaly work in a system that encouraged even a moderately successful businessman/general to murder his way to the top.