Why Egypt reaches into Asia

A triangle in Asia

Sinai is a triangle of desert and mountains of about 61,000 km² between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba. The Gulf of Suez and the Suez Canal cut it off from the rest of Egypt, but to the east it runs on into the Negev with no marked change in the land, and it is usually regarded as being geographically part of Asia.^[1]

The canal is the line most often drawn between the continents. It runs 193 km across the Isthmus of Suez, the only land bridge between Africa and Asia, and since it was finished in 1869 it has separated the two.^[2]

Egypt’s for millennia

The earliest written records of Sinai, from about 3000 BCE, are of Egyptian expeditions there in search of copper. For centuries the road along its northern coast was the main trade route between Egypt and Palestine.^[1] After 1517 it was part of the Ottoman Empire.^[1]

In 1841 the Ottoman sultan made Mohammed Ali hereditary pasha of Egypt, a privileged vassal state inside the empire, and Egypt was empowered to administer Sinai, though how far east its control reached shifted over the following decades.^[3]

The 1906 line

Britain occupied Egypt in 1882 to secure the canal, its route to India. In 1892 a new sultan’s decree defined Egypt’s territory by a line from Rafah to Suez, without mentioning Sinai. A telegram from the sultan’s government then confirmed that Egypt would keep administering the parts of Sinai east of that line, and Britain’s agent Lord Cromer described its limit as a line from near El Arish to the head of the Gulf of Aqaba.^[3]

In 1906 Ottoman troops occupied Taba, and Turkey argued that the 1892 decree meant the Rafah–Suez line. The British saw a Rafah–Aqaba line as vital to the canal’s security. On 3 May 1906 they gave the sultan an ultimatum, backed by a threat to seize Turkish islands in the Mediterranean. He withdrew from Taba, and in notes of 14 and 15 May the two sides agreed a line running “approximately straight” from Rafah to the Gulf of Aqaba.^[3]

That line is still Egypt’s eastern border. Israel occupied Sinai in the Six-Day War of June 1967 and returned it to Egypt in 1982 under their 1979 peace treaty.^[1]

“the line of demarcation running approximately straight from Rafeh in a south-easterly direction to a point on the Gulf of Akaba not less than 3 miles from Akaba”^[3]