The Fayûm and Lake Mœris

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THE FAYÛM AND LAKE MŒRIS.
FRONTISPIECE.
OLD LAHÛN REGULATOR.
AT THE POINT WHERE THE BAHR YÛSUF TURNS WESTWARDS INTO THE FAYÛM.
The down-stream wing of the upper regulator is seen projecting into the foreground on the left-hand side, and the Lahûn Pyramid is visible in the distance.
MAJOR R. H. BROWN, Royal Engineers, INSPECTOR GENERAL OF IRRIGATION, UPPER EGYPT.
WITH A PREFATORY NOTE BY COL. SIR COLIN SCOTT-MONCRIEFF, K.C.M.G., C.S.I.,
And Illustrations FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR.
LONDON: EDWARD STANFORD, 26 & 27, COCKSPUR STREET, CHARING CROSS, S.W. 1892.
During the last nine years it has fallen to the honourable lot of a small band of English engineers, most of them trained in India, to effect a revolution in the irrigation system of old Egypt, and thereby materially to improve the wealth and agricultural prosperity of the country. This is not the place, nor would it be becoming on my part to tell what has been effected. We had the happy fortune to find things at their lowest ebb. We could hardly make a change without making an improvement. In all these improvements Major Robert Hanbury Brown, R.E., has from the first occupied a conspicuous place. Few Englishmen have gone through so many summer seasons as he has, in the blazing heat of Upper Egypt. For that has been his field of labour, and of that field the fertile, abnormal, neglected, quaint old Province of the Fayûm forms a part. Truly, an old world province! whose historical roll carries us back to very early days, before that venerable Sheikh Abraham had made his emigration from Assyrian Haran—a province abundantly watered, and therefore rich, and highly prized by Pharaoh and Ptolemy, Cæsar and Arab Khalif, until Mameluke misrule and Turkish brutish ignorance let it fall into decay.
It has fallen to Major Brown to help to restore the Fayûm, and he has thus obtained a very intimate knowledge of it. He is not the first author on this subject. Learned Germans and brilliant Frenchmen have already written on the Fayûm. Major Brown pretends neither to the learning of the one, nor to the brilliancy of the other, but he has, what neither one nor the other ever had, an accurate knowledge of the levels of the country. This information is quite indispensable to the hydraulic engineer, and it is strange that that distinguished Frenchman M. Linant de Bellefonds, who devoted so many years to the physical improvement of Egypt, should have been evidently without it.