Aside the Assassins's Club wants a small piece of a desert land between Indian ocean and Mediterranean sea to build a channel there, Suez Channel was already done at its time during President Grant on the chair of White House when this series took place.
The Ottoman Empire had Sultans, not Emirs.
Clay bets that he can "do it in a minute" and Jones flips the hourglass, presumably a one minute hourglass. With no apparent break in the action, the sand runs out 22 seconds later.
In the 1870s, cancan performances were still considered somewhat scandalous (comparable to the attitudes towards go-go dancing in the 1960s) and was usually performed by courtesans and b-level actresses. It gained semi-respectability in the late 1890s and early 1900s before being eclipsed in the scandalous scale by burlesque and striptease.