Darius I built the canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea. Known as the Canal of the Pharaohs or the Darius Canal, it ran through Egypt’s Wadi Tumilat toward the Red Sea.
The project connected Persian-controlled Egypt with a maritime route leading toward the Red Sea and beyond. Darius commemorated the work with a series of inscriptions, including the Chalouf Stele, which celebrated the canal’s construction and completion. The waterway followed a different route from the modern Suez Canal.
The project’s history is more complicated than the quiz answer suggests. Earlier Egyptian rulers, especially Necho II, appear to have begun or revived canal work, while later Greek and Roman writers claimed that Darius failed to complete it. Darius’s own inscriptions and Herodotus present a more favorable account, so historians debate the precise stages of excavation and reopening.
Cambyses II conquered Egypt for the Achaemenid Empire, but he is not the ruler associated with this canal. Xerxes I and Cyrus the Great likewise built other imperial works, not the Nile–Red Sea waterway traditionally called Darius’s canal.