The Faiyum Depression

Extract

With the publication of Sir Hanbury Brown’s Fayoum and Lake Moeris in 1892, it was widely believed that the problem of the situation and extent of the Lake Moeris of antiquity had been finally solved. Sir Hanbury Brown pointed out that the shore-lines of an ancient lake could be traced in the Faiyum at a level of about 22 metres above sea; he concluded that this lake, which must have covered almost the whole of what is now the Faiyum province of Egypt, was the ancient Lake Moeris, and that the remarkable gravelly ridge known as the ‘Idwa Bank was the remains of an artificial embankment which had served to reclaim from the lake a comparatively small area around the present town of Medinet-el-Faiyum. Sir Hanbury Brown’s views received ready acceptance, because whilst satisfying all the modern levelling and other observations which had up to that time been made, they were also in tolerable accord with the account of Lake Moeris given by Herodotus and copied by subsequent classical writers.