Building the Suez Canal:
Historic Photos

Serendipity—finding something you didn’t realize you were looking for—is always a pleasure, and in museums it often means going for one exhibition and finding another you didn’t know was there. I found this one by making a wrong turn at the Musée on my way to the Art is in the Streets exhibit on the opposite side of the museum.

In the 1860s, when the Suez Canal was under construction, it was far away from its nervous and sometimes contentious investors, who wanted reassurance that the work was moving forward, that difficulties were being overcome, and that they would someday see their money back.

It was also a period when photography was relatively new, and mostly taking place in the studio, although photographers like Charles Marville were already documenting Paris and the massive changes it was undergoing. The Suez Canal Company recognized the value of photos both for its own use, and for showing the world a picture of apparently busy, organized and successful construction—especially after a period of turmoil resulting from a change from forced to paid labor.

The photographs in the exhibit are the work of Louis-Robert Cuvier, hired by the canal company in 1866 and 1867 to tour its works and provide a visual record. Most of them speak for themselves; together they are a record of vast and varied activity.

How large and complicated this could be can be seen in notes from de Lesseps: “Over the course of two years, Egyptian contingent workers had removed the entire upper part of the Chalouf Sill and excavated the trench down to sea level. Below this level we found a very hard bed of rock. As a result (the contractors) had to employ miners whom they recruited from northern Italy.”

The work included not only excavation, but the building of terminals, ports, and even new cities such as Port Said and Ismailia.

Not actually part of the Canal project, this “cottage” at the new town of Ismailia was built for the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt, then still part of the Ottoman Empire.

Railroads were built to connect large workshops and depots to construction areas; maintaining the system across large areas of sandy soil required constant work.

Photography wasn’t the only new technology at work—the canal project was one of the first to use the bucket excavators, above, invented by Couvreau, which became a canal contractor on the strength of their equipment.

The work was completed and the canal opened in 1869. Cuvier was long gone by then. The opening ceremonies were recorded largely in sketches and paintings such as this one by Edouard Riou—but there’s at least one photograph, nowhere as near the quality of Cuvier’s.