The Fayûm and Lake MœrisBrown, R. H. (Robert Hanbury)
History
The Fayûm and Lake Mœris
Brown, R. H. (Robert Hanbury)
Fayyum (Egypt) -- Description and travel; Moeris, Lake (Egypt)
The disappearance of all trace of the regulators is felt by some
to be a difficulty in the way of the admission of their former
existence, inasmuch as the ancients built on such a colossal
scale. But the Labyrinth, which was built out of the reach of water,
has disappeared, and its traces were only of late years identified
in a mass of stone chips and trenches filled with sand, which
underlay the foundations. Such being the fate of the Labyrinth,
which must have surpassed the regulators as a structure of colossal
dimensions, it is only natural to suppose that the stones forming
the superstructure of the regulators should also have been removed
for the same objects as the stones of the Labyrinth, and, if the
materials of the floors were spared, it would only be on account of
their situation being unfavourable to their removal. But, if spared,
the action of running water would in time cause their disappearance,
either by undermining them and burying them to depths below their
original position, or by depositing a layer of mud above them. In
the latter case they may still exist in a situation where some future
excavation may chance to bring them to light again.
Hence I hold that, in the face of Strabo’s explicit statement that
there were regulators at each end of the canal for controlling the
inflow and outflow of the lake, the objection of want of evidence of
the former existence of regulators is not sufficiently strong to be
allowed to have much weight against the theory, that the submerged
Fayûm, with the entry and exit of its waters kept under control
by regulators, and its water-levels ranging between R.L. 22·50
and 19·50, was the Lake Mœris of Herodotus; the Arsinoïte Nome,
in connection with it, consisting of the reclaimed high lands within
the limits of the lake and along the borders of the lake itself and
margins of the feeder canal. It is admitted, as a weak point in this
theory, that unless the Arsinoïte Nome can be imagined as extending
into the Nile Valley, the area of cultivable land comprised in the
nome is very limited. Let us see how far such a conception of Lake
Mœris is in accord with the testimony of the ancient records which
relate to it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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