Nah, it was New Kingdom in date, and the conventional chronology of that time is arfed up. Hence the puzzling over its actual origin date by people who buy into the pseudochronology.
“Nah, it was New Kingdom in date, and the conventional chronology of that time is arfed up.”
Yep I agree to a point. The claim is that they started it back then but stopped short of connecting it and abandoned it. Then later it was continued. But it was done before the Romans. Definitely used during the era of the Greeks before.
“At le ast as far back as Aristotle there have been suggestions that perhaps as early as the 12th Dynasty, Pharaoh Senusret III (1878–1839 BC), called Sesostris by the Greeks, may have started a canal joining the River Nile with the Red Sea. In his Meteorology, Aristotle wrote:
One of their kings tried to make a canal to it (for it would have been of no little advantage to them for the whole region to have become navigable; Sesostris is said to have been the first of the ancient kings to try), but he found that the sea was higher than the land. So he first, and Darius afterwards, stopped making the canal, lest the sea should mix with the river water and spoil it.”
“Strabo also wrote that Sesostris started to build a canal, as did Pliny the Elder (see quote further down).[11]
However, the canal was probably first cut or at least begun by Necho II (r. 610–595 BC), in the late 7th century BC, and it was either re-dug or possibly completed by Darius the Great (r. 550–486 BC). Classical sources disagree as to when it was finally completed.[citation needed]
Darius the Great’s Suez Inscriptions comprise five Egyptian monuments, including the Chalouf Stele,[12] that commemorate the construction and completion of the canal linking the Nile River with the Red Sea by Darius I of Persia.[13] They were located along the Darius Canal through the valley of Wadi Tumilat and probably recorded sections of the canal as well.[14] In the second half of the 19th century, French cartographers discovered the remnants of the north–south section of Darius Canal past the east side of Lake Timsah and ending near the north end of the Great Bitter Lake.[15]
Pliny the Elder wrote:
165. Next comes the Tyro tribe and, on the Red Sea, the harbour of the Daneoi, from which Sesostris, king of Egypt, intended to carry a ship-canal to where the Nile flows into what is known as the Delta; this is a distance of over 60 miles. Later the Persian king Darius had the same idea, and yet again Ptolemy II, who made a trench 100 feet wide, 30 feet deep and about 35 miles long, as far as the Bitter Lakes.[11]
Although Herodotus (2.158) tells us Darius I continued work on the canal, Aristotle (Aristot. met. I 14 P 352b.), Strabo (Strab. XVII 1, 25 C 804. 805.), and Pliny the Elder (Plin. n. h. VI 165f.) all say that he failed to complete it,[16] while Diodorus Siculus does not mention a completion of the canal by Necho II.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_of_the_Pharaohs#References