The Fayûm and Lake Mœris

by R. H. Brown

I too have had advantages of studying the ground itself and the way the water runs, such as few have had, and have come in for the legacy of Colonel Ross’s levellings and maps.

The names of Linant and Lepsius do not therefore carry with them sufficient authority to override the facts, which are ascertained to be such by a more thorough examination of the country and a better knowledge of the physical features of the province.

Irrigation officers may, perhaps, not be classed as “savants,” but they have at least as much right to be heard as any other body of experts on such a subject as Lake Mœris, which is more than anything else an irrigation question, and one that has especial interest of a more or less practical nature at this time, when the question of the construction of Nile reservoirs for the storage of the surplus waters of the Nile is under consideration.

COPE WHITEHOUSE THEORY.

Mr. Cope Whitehouse, who has a personal acquaintance with the Fayûm, and has studied the question of Lake Mœris, though with a prejudice in favour of giving the Wadi Raiân a leading part, would possibly have been inclined to hold the same views as I do, had it not been for his anxiety to recommend the Wadi Raiân for future use by magnifying its imaginary past performances. But as his views about the Wadi Raiân are the essential and distinctive part of his theory, we do not agree.

For ten years Mr. Whitehouse has been brooding, as the faithfullest of mothers, over his theory, looking for a practical project to be hatched therefrom, but, as time passes, he begins to show signs of impatience, and fears lest his egg be addled. The possibilities as to what the chick may be when it appears, are set forth in Chapter V. of this paper, for I cannot but think that the egg is a good one.

Mr. Whitehouse believes that in prehistoric times, before artificial works of control were made, the Nile flowed into and submerged the whole Fayûm, which was filled at high Nile, and that when the flood subsided, the return flow, that took place from the Fayûm to the Nile, prolonged the period of inundation by at least two months. He also believes that the river flowed in a single channel along the eastern desert.

So far most of us who have our theories about the Fayûm travel together, with but small differences on the way. But after this our roads diverge, and each thinks the road he has selected leads to Lake Mœris. But they cannot all go there.

Leaving prehistoric times, and coming to the period of ancient history, Mr. Whitehouse holds that there were two lakes. At first the northern lake, the Fayûm, was a lake and marsh serving as a backwater to the Nile, while the southern, the Wadi Raiân, was dry. So far I agree with him, but now we part company. Subsequently, he imagines, engineers of an alien race diverted the flood waters into the dry Wadi Raiân to the south-west and evaporation dried up the Fayûm, which was then irrigated by a system of canals. The Wadi Raiân basin becoming, full served as a reservoir, and was, according to Mr. Whitehouse, the “Mœridis Lacus” of Ptolemy.

Later on, in 1890, Mr. Whitehouse explains his views in terms which are not quite in agreement with the foregoing, for he then supposes that the natural backwater of the Nile included the Fayûm and Wadi Raiân (with its minor basins Wadis “Safir” and “Lulu”) at one and the same time, and that these combined basins were filled to the level of high Nile, which he puts at R.L. 30·00.