Mediterranean–Dead Sea Canal in 1855 in a work called 'The Dead Sea – A new route to India'. At that time it was not yet known that the Dead Sea lies below sea level, and Allen proposed this canal as an alternative to the Suez Canal. Later, many engineers and politicians picked up on the idea, including Theodor Herzl in his 1902 novel "Altneuland". Most of the early proposals used the East bank of the Jordan River, but a modified form, using the West bank, was proposed after the separation of Transjordan from the Palestine Mandate. The idea was discussed at some length
Dead Sea Essenes settled on the Dead Sea's western shore; Pliny the Elder identifies their location with the words, "on the west side of the Dead Sea, away from the coast ... [above] the town of Engeda" ("Natural History", Bk 5.73); and it is therefore a hugely popular but contested hypothesis today, that same Essenes are identical with the settlers at Qumran and that "the Dead Sea Scrolls" discovered during the 20th century in the nearby caves had been their own library. Josephus identified the Dead Sea in geographic proximity to the ancient Biblical city of Sodom. However, he referred to the