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Receding Red Sea and the dwindling Nile

The Red Sea is believed by some historians to have gradually receded over the centuries, its coastline slowly moving southward away from Lake Timsah and the Great Bitter Lake. 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 seems to have had no west–east waterway passage, because the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, which fed Ptolemy's west–east canal, had by that time dwindled, being choked with silt. 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 Arabs of Petra attacked and burned the first wave of these ships and Cleopatra abandoned the effort. (Modern historians, however, maintain that her ships were burned by the enemy forces of Malichus I.)