Lake Manzala ( ''baḥīrat manzala''), also Manzaleh, is a brackish lake, sometimes called a lagoon, in northeastern Egypt on the

Nile Delta The Nile Delta (, or simply , ) is the River delta, delta formed in Lower Egypt where the Nile River spreads out and drains into the Mediterranean Sea. It is one of the world's larger deltas—from Alexandria in the west to Port Said in the eas ...

near

Port Said Port Said ( , , ) is a port city that lies in the northeast Egypt extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, straddling the west bank of the northern mouth of the Suez Canal. The city is the capital city, capital of the Port S ...

and a few miles from the ancient ruins at

Tanis Tanis ( ; ; ) or San al-Hagar (; ; ; or or ; ) is the Greek name for ancient Egyptian ''ḏꜥn.t'', an important archaeological site in the northeastern Nile Delta of ancient Egypt, Egypt, and the location of a city of the same name. Tanis ...

.Dinar, p.51 It is the largest of the northern deltaic lakes of Egypt. As of 2008 it is long and wide.Zahran, p.283

Etymology

The lake's name derives from . In

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...

it was also known as pi-Manjōili (), translated into Greek as Xenedokhou (), thus making the modern Arabic name a translation of a Coptic one, where phonetic resemblance is only coincidental.

Geography

Lake Manzala is long but quite shallow. Though Lake Manzala's unaltered depth is only , alterations to the depth were made during the construction of the Suez Canal to allow the Canal to extend lengthwise along the lake. Its bed is soft clay. Before construction of the Suez Canal, Lake Manzala was separated from the

Mediterranean Sea The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern Eur ...

by a strip of sand wide. Port Said was established adjacent to Lake Manzala during the nineteenth century to support canal construction and related travel. The lake's location directly south of the Port Said Airport restricts the city's capacity for growth.

Suez Canal

Lake Manzala is the northernmost of three natural lakes intersected by the

Suez Canal The Suez Canal (; , ') is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, Indo-Mediterranean, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea through the Isthmus of Suez and dividing Africa and Asia (and by extension, the Sinai Peninsula from the rest ...

, the other two being Lake Timsah and the Great Bitter Lake. Construction of the canal proceeded from north to south, reaching Manzala first. Due to the lake's shallowness, it was necessary to dig a banked channel for ships to pass.

Ecology

Lake Manzala served as a significant source of inexpensive fish for human consumption in Egypt, but pollution and lake drainage have reduced the lake's productivity. In 1985, the lakes fishery was an open area of and employed roughly 17,000 workers. The government of Egypt drained substantial portions of the lake in an effort to convert its rich Nile deposits to farmland. The project was unprofitable: crops did not grow well in the salty soil and the value of resulting produce was less than the market value of the fish that the reclaimed land had formerly yielded. By 2001, Lake Manzala had lost approximately 80 percent of its former area through the effects of drainage efforts.Ibrahim, p.145

Notes

References

* * * * {{Authority control Manzala Nile Delta Port Said