topographers. How, in fact, was it possible to find in the Fayûm a site
which could have contained a basin measuring at least ninety miles in
circumference? Linant supposed "Lake Moeris" to have extended over the
whole of the low-lying land which skirts the Libyan cliffs between Illahûn
and Medinet el Fayûm; but recent explorations have proved that the dikes by
which this pretended reservoir was bounded are modern works, erected
probably within the last two hundred years. Major Brown has lately shown
that the nucleus of "Lake Moeris" was the Birket el Kûrûn.[8] This was
known to the Egyptians as _Miri, Mi-ûri,_ the Great Lake, whence the Greeks
derived their _Moiris_ a name extended also to the inundation of the Fayûm.
If Herodotus did actually visit this province, it was probably in summer,
at the time of the high Nile, when the whole district presents the
appearance of an inland sea. What he took for the shores of this lake were
the embankments which divided it into basins and acted as highways between
the various towns. His narrative, repeated by the classic authors, has
been accepted by the moderns; and Egypt, neither accepting nor rejecting
it, was gratified long after date with the reputation of a gigantic work
which would in truth have been the glory of her civil engineers, if it had
ever existed. I do not believe that "Lake Moeris" ever did exist. The only
works of the kind which the Egyptians undertook were much less pretentious.
These consist of stone-built dams erected at the mouths of many of those
lateral ravines, or wadys, which lead down from the mountain ranges into
the valley of the Nile. One of the most important among them was pointed
out, in 1885, by Dr. Schweinfurth, at a distance of about six miles and a
half from the Baths of Helwan, at the mouth of the Wady Gerraweh (fig. 47).
It answered two purposes, firstly, as a means of storing the water of the
inundation for the use of the workmen in the neighbouring quarries; and,
secondly, as a barrier to break the force of the torrents which rush down
from the desert after the heavy rains of springtime and winter. The ravine
measures about 240 feet in width, the sides being on an average from 40 to