PREFATORY NOTE.
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.
Of course Major Brown could not write of the Fayûm without introducing the mystic Lake Mœris. Herodotus does not lie when he tells of the things he has actually seen, and he says he saw Lake Mœris. So it must have existed. But where was it? That is the question that has been asked from one generation to another.
In the following pages Major Brown, in simple, straightforward language, gives his opinion, and the reader may be sure that he does not talk of what he does not know. Whether his conclusions are correct or not, this account of the Fayûm is an important addition to our knowledge of the subject.
Colin Scott-Moncrieff,
Late Under-Secretary of State, Public Works Ministry, Cairo.
London, September 1st, 1892.