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)
Mr. Flinders Petrie considers that these ruins are the remains of
what was once a place of embarkation and disembarkation on the lake,
consisting of a flight of steps, flanked by two colossi raised
on high pedestals. In one of his publications he has pictorially
reproduced these colossi, their pedestals and enclosure walls, in a
most complete manner (Plate XXIII.), his only personal acquaintance
with the figures consisting of a broken nose and fragments of stone
drapery, discovered among the débris of their ruins. To one of the
uninitiated, even after studying the evidence adduced by Mr. Petrie,
there appears to be a great deal of esoteric ingenuity or imagination
in the process of reproduction, but one or the other of these gifts
is a necessity in dealing with anything Egyptological on account of
the incompleteness of the historical records. Plate XXIII. gives a
reproduction of Mr. Petrie’s restoration, and Plate XXII. is from
a photograph of the ruins as they exist now. The reduced levels have
been added by me.
In Mr. Petrie’s restoration he has shown the worshipper down below,
standing on the general country level. My idea is that the interior
of the courtyard was filled up to the level of the surrounding wall
and formed a landing-place, as I have indicated in Plate XXIV. by
the upper figure and the boats. If the water stood up against the
courtyard wall, as I have shown, since there is no mortar in the
joints of the masonry, the man below (as shown in Mr. Petrie’s
unmodified representation) would have been drowned out.
This landing-place was probably connected at the back by a bank with
the main bank running through Biahmu.
It appears that some say that the lake waters flowed into and out of
the lake by one and the same channel, and that others say there were
two canals, one for the inflow and another for the outflow. These two
accounts may be reconciled by supposing that the former referred to
the canal south of Abûsir-el-Malaq, which is a single canal, Plate
XXI., and that the latter referred to the channels, one of which was
for the inflow from the Nile near Ashment, to Abûsir-el-Malaq, and
the other for the outflow from Abûsir-el-Malaq to Memphis or perhaps
to the point on the Nile where Kosheshah Escape stands. Strabo is
obscure on this point. He writes:—“Then follows the Heracleöte
Nome, in a large island, near which is the canal on the right hand,
which leads into Libya, in the direction of the Arsinoïte Nome;
so that the canal has two entrances, a part of the island on one
side being interposed between them.” Possibly this refers to
the isolated bit of desert in front of and to the east of Lahûn,
which is “a part of the island” interposed between the Bahr
Yûsuf coming from the south and passing to Lahûn on the left of
the island, and the Magnûnah canal or special lake-feeder, which
passes on the right of the island, turns south towards Lahûn and
leads into Libya in the direction of the Arsinoïte Nome.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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