Wadi Tumilat in the context of "Darius the Great's Suez Inscriptions"

The Canal of the Pharaohs, also called the Ancient Suez Canal or Necho's Canal or Darius Canal, is the forerunner of the Suez Canal, constructed in ancient times and kept in use, with intermissions, until being closed in 767 AD for strategic reasons during a rebellion. It followed a different course from its modern counterpart, by linking the Nile to the Red Sea via the Wadi Tumilat. Work began under the pharaohs. According to Darius the Great's Suez Inscriptions and Herodotus, the first opening of the canal was under Persian king Darius the Great, but later ancient authors like Aristotle, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder claim that he failed to complete the work. Another possibility is that it was finished in the Ptolemaic period under Ptolemy II, when engineers solved the problem of overcoming the difference in height through canal locks.

Lake Timsah, Arabic for Crocodile Lake (Arabic: بُحَيْرة التِّمْسَاح), is a lake in Egypt on the Nile Delta. It lies in a basin developed along a fault extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Gulf of Suez through the Bitter Lakes region. In 1800, a flood filled the Wadi Tumilat, which caused Timsah's banks to overflow and moved water south into the Bitter Lakes about nine miles (14 km) away. In 1862, the lake was filled with waters from the Red Sea, and became part of the Suez Canal.