Searching for Sesostris

A new French exhibition presents what is known about the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Sesostris III, writes David Tresilian in Paris

Not as famous as his New Kingdom successors Ramses II or Tutankhamun, and not responsible for the kind of grand building projects that immortalised his Old Kingdom predecessors Khufu and Khafre, builders of the largest of the Great Pyramids at Giza, the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Sesostris III was nevertheless one of the country’s most important rulers, becoming a kind of symbolic embodiment of ancient Egyptian kingship.

However, until recently it has been difficult to disentangle fact from fiction in inherited accounts of the pharaoh’s accomplishments, with modern historians tending to see the list of achievements attributed to Sesostris III by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, for example, as either invented or a composite of actions taken by many different rulers.

According to Herodotus, writing in the long second book of his Histories dedicated to ancient Egypt, Sesostris, an unusually war-like ruler, sailed down the Arabian Gulf with a fleet of warships, subduing coastal tribes as he did so. Later, he led campaigns in Asia, defeating the Scythians, and even led Egyptian armies into southern Europe, defeating sundry armies in Thrace.

“It is a fact,” Herodotus writes, “that the Colchians are of Egyptian descent,” indicating that Sesostris and his armies reached the far side of the Black Sea. “I noticed this myself before I heard anyone else mention it… and found that the Colchians remembered the Egyptians more distinctly than the Egyptians remembered them.”

Legend of the Sesostris Canal

There is no historical evidence for the existence of the ancient Sesostris Canal that was once said to link the Nile to the Red Sea, writes Al-Sayed Mahfouz

During media discussions of the new Suez Canal project that is to be built in parallel to the existing canal in the east of the country, many references were made to an ancient canal that the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Sesostris is said to have dug to link the Nile with the Red Sea. Many take the existence of this canal as a historical fact, when its existence has never been proved, however.

According to legend, Sesostris III, the fifth pharoah of the twelfth dynasty, connected the now extinct Pelusiac Branch of the Nile with the Red Sea by a canal. This story is mentioned in many books on the period, and a section of the new Suez Museum has even been set aside to this alleged canal. But the story is false.

The tendency to offer legend as fact in some Egyptian museums is deplorable and even laughable. Another example of this tendency is the so-called mummy of Hatshepsut, currently in display in the Egyptian Museum, which has not been irrefutably linked to the ancient queen.
Those who wish to learn more about the Sesostris Canal can refer to an excellent Arabic-language essay written by the late professor Abdel-Moneim Abdel-Halim, “The Nile-Red Sea Canal called the Sesostris Canal,” in which he examines, and refutes, the story.

The legend started with the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who attributed the digging of the canal to the pharaoh Nkhaw in 610 BCE, saying that it was left incomplete. But archaeological work conducted near Suez and the Bitter Lakes have produced no traces of habitation connected with the Middle Kingdom, during which Sesostris reportedly dug the said canal.