Necho II at some point during his Syrian campaign initiates but never completes the ambitious project of cutting a navigable canal from the Pelusiac branch of the Nile to the Red Sea.

Necho's Canal is the earliest precursor of the Suez Canal.

It is in connection with this new activity that Necho founds a new city of Per-Temu Tjeku which translates as 'The House of Atum of Tjeku' at the site now known as Tell el-Maskhuta, about fifteen kilometers west of Ismailia.

The waterway is intended to facilitate trade between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.

Necho also forms an Egyptian navy by recruiting displaced Ionian Greeks.

This is an unprecedented act by the pharaoh since most Egyptians have traditionally harbored an inherent distaste for and fear of the sea.

The navy that Necho has created operates along both the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts.

The religio-political Muslim Brotherhood (Arabic: Al-ikhwan Al-muslimun), founded in 1928 at Isma'iliyah, Egypt, by Hassan al-Banna', advocates a return to the Qur'an and the Hadith as guidelines for a healthy, modern Islamic society.

The brotherhood will spread rapidly throughout Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and North Africa.

The Muslim Brotherhood begins to politicize its outlook after 1938, demanding purity of the Islamic world and rejecting westernization, secularization, and modernization.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which has organized a terrorist arm in Egypt, poses a threat to the monarchy and the ruling Wafd Party when the Egyptian government seems to weaken in the mid-1940s.

British bulldozers and Centurion tanks had demolished fifty Egyptian mud houses to open a road to a water supply for the British army in December 1951.

This incident and one that follows on January 25 provoke intense Egyptian anger.

On January 25, 1952, the British attack an Egyptian police barracks at Ismailiya (Al Ismailiyah) when its occupants refuse to surrender to British troops.

Fifty Egyptians are killed and one hundred wounded.