Giuseppe Verdi Verdi and Giuseppina decided to adopt Carlo's great-niece Filomena Maria Verdi, then seven years old, as their own child. She was to marry in 1878 the son of Verdi's friend and lawyer Angelo Carrara and her family became eventually the heirs of Verdi's estate. "Aida" was commissioned by the Egyptian government for the opera house built by the Khedive Isma'il Pasha to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The opera house actually opened with a production of "Rigoletto". The prose libretto in French by Camille du Locle, based on a scenario by the Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, was
Raid on the Suez Canal infantry brigades were highly trained and the infrastructure necessary to get a large force quickly across the Suez Canal did not exist. The only mounted force available was the Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade and the eight companies of the Bikanir Camel Corps but these were distributed along the Suez Canal defences and unable to concentrate a larger force to attack and capture three divisions of Ottoman infantry. The Ottoman Army maintained advance troops and outposts on the Sinai peninsula on a line between El Arish and Nekhl, with forces at Gaza and Beersheba. Kress von Kressenstein, Djemal Pasha's German Chief-of