The history of the reclamation of the Arsinoite nome, or department, now the Faioum, would, if it had been preserved, or could be recovered, throw much precious light on the antiquity and power of the civilization of the primæval monarchy. But the simple fact that its details had been lost, even in the remote days of Theban learning and magnificence, when Egypt was at the summit of its greatness and glory, possesses of itself much historical value, for it shows at how much earlier a day the great undertaking had been carried out; and that, as we know, by such a system of hydraulic works, the newly-won district, too, having been adorned with such cities and buildings, as leave no doubt about the high character of its (were it not for the remains of these works and structures) prehistoric civilization.

The Faioum is, geographically, a basin formed by a depression in the Libyan range, about sixty miles to the south of the Pyramids of Gizeh. The basin is about the size of Oxfordshire, or Surrey, that is to say, it contains about 750 square, miles. More than 100 of these may be occupied by the Birket el Keiroon, a natural lake, which forms its northern and western boundary. This large piece of water resembles a rude crescent, with its convex side to the north and north-west, and its concave side to the south and south-east. On the former side the contiguous desert rises into a hilly ridge; this boundary being in fact an offset of the African range. The other side of the lake looks upon the dry and shelving descent of the basin, which, from its southern summit down to the edge of the water, has a fall of about 100 feet, being about fifteen miles across. There are considerable discrepancies as to the precise amount of this fall; some measurements making it more, and some less than the 100 feet here given.

When things were in their natural state, undisturbed by man, the Birket el Keiroon was a lake, as it is now. In those days, as in our own, it was supplied with water, just as the pool within the enclosure of Karnak, and other pools, and all the wells in Egypt, by natural infiltration; for the water of the river percolates readily through the porous strata, and flows into any sufficiently deep depressions, or excavations. The existence of the oases also in the desert must be accounted for in this way.

The Bahr Jusuf Canal had, at some unrecorded date, been brought along the foot of the Libyan range. Starting from Diospolis Parva, by the air-line forty miles below Thebes, it had traversed the whole of the rest of the valley; then, passing through the Delta, it had reached the sea, somewhere in the neighbourhood of modern Alexandria; a distance, again, in the air-line of 400 miles; though, of course, this falls very far short of giving the measure of its ceaseless sinuosities. This Grand Canal of old Egypt now carries off about a twenty-eighth part of the water that passes over the cataract of Philæ. In its course it flows along the depressed range that forms the eastern boundary of the Faioum. In this depressed range there is a ravine through which in early days, at the season of the inundation, some of the overflow of the Bahr Jusuf found its way to the top level of the Faioum. It is not easy now, to decide whether it got through naturally at first, or whether the ravine was canalized to enable it to pass through. At all events it is evident that, if there had originally been a natural passage, it was levelled and enlarged by man availing himself of natural fissures and depressions. But however this might have been, the inundation having found its way on to the upper level of the Faioum, appears to have formed there an immense morass.

The first condition, then, of the district had been a dry desert, precisely resembling any other part of the desert, except that it slanted from what may be spoken of as the rim of its mussel-shell-like depression down to the spring-fed Birket el Keiroon. Its second condition, that now before us, is what was brought about by the water of the inundation, that had in some way or other been let into the district: it formed wherever it was retained, and chiefly on the upper plateau, a vast extent of morasses. We have the evidence of geology for the former—for we see that the original surface of the district consisted of thin layers of limestone, alternating with layers of clay—and of tradition for the latter.

We now come to the third, which is the historical, stage. By a series of enormous dykes, some of them several miles in length, the enclosed space having a breadth also of some miles, the inflowing water was confined to certain portions of the upper plateau; perhaps the whole of the upper plateau was by these means formed into a lake. The water thus retained and secured, was amply sufficient for the perennial irrigation of the whole of the descent reaching from the upper southern plateau down to the Birket el Keiroon, and for a district to the west and south, and, when the effects of the inundation began to be exhausted in the valley of Egypt, for the contiguous departments of Memphis and Heracleopolis. In this way the creation of the Faioum, the most fertile province in Egypt, was far from being the whole of the benefit derived from these vast waterworks.

The lake, or series of connected lakes, formed on the summit of the plateau may have been twenty miles long, and two or three wide. This was the famous Lake Mœris. The water was made to enter the lake by a channel, which probably commenced at the modern Howarah, and was drawn off for irrigation outside the Faioum by a channel which appears to have passed out at Illahoun. In each of these a sluice was constructed. The extreme costliness of opening and shutting these sluices shows that they must have been enormous structures: but this was only in proportion to the vast volume of water that passed through them. To fill such lakes during the time of the high water of the inundation nothing less than a considerable river would have sufficed. We can only think it very much to the credit of these primæval engineers that they managed such sluices at all. Nothing like either the slatts, or the locks, on some of our rivers for holding back the water, would have answered their purpose. They wisely made the channel for letting out the water quite distinct from that for letting it in; for, if one of the sluices got out of order, then the other might be used while the damages of the injured one were being repaired. In a matter of life and death to so many it would not have done at all to have had only one string to their bow.

But to revert to the gains of these vast hydraulic constructions. An entirely new department had been added to Egypt. It was called the Arsinoite, or Crocodilopolite nome, from Arsinöe or Crocodilopolis, its capital; and turned out, from its more thorough exposure to air than was possible in the valley of Egypt, the richest and most productive part of the kingdom. Its produce was better and more varied. For the six low-water months also during which the stored-up treasure of its great lake flowed back into the valley, it maintained the irrigation of the contiguous river-side departments. Some of the canals of India may have done as much, but no work of man was ever grander in its conception, more completely successful in all it aimed at achieving, or of greater and more undoubted utility. It must have brought into being, and kept in existence, more than 500,000 souls in the department it created, and in those whose productiveness it increased; for we are speaking of land which, we must remember, was not cultivated as our farms, or even as our gardens are, and which produced never less than two crops a year; and which not being inundated, as the land in the valley, but irrigated, and warped, regularly, and at will, all the year round, was capable of yielding three crops annually. Every square foot of ground in the Faioum, all the conditions of warmth, fertility, and moisture being always present, was kept working, at the highest power, through every hour of the twelve months.

In Lake Mœris the crocodile abounded, having come in with the water. It thus became to the inhabitants of the nome the symbol of the life-giving water; and, having become to their minds the representative of that upon which everything depended, as had been the case with other symbols, it was held sacred, and eventually worshipped. Just so in the lower departments outside, where they had once had too much water, and which had not become inhabitable till the water had been drained, and dyked off, and regulated, not the crocodile, but the ichneumon, the enemy of the crocodile, had, by an analogous process, become an object of worship. They had suffered from water, and could only with difficulty keep it from overwhelming their lowlands; and so they made a symbol, for the idea of regulating water that encroached and was destructive, of that which was supposed to destroy what their neighbours had made a symbol of water itself. Here was a symbol upon a symbol. But these were people who thought in hieroglyphics; and to get to an understanding of what they meant we must translate their hieroglyphical modes of thought and expression into our own direct modes.

This lake so abounded in fish—more than twenty species were found in it—that the daily take, during the six months the water was flowing out, was sold for a talent of silver, about two hundred pounds of our money. During the time the water was flowing in the average of the amounts of the daily sales was the third of a talent. The king gave these proceeds of the lake fisheries to the queen for pin-money. The quantity of fish taken was so great that there was at times a difficulty in pickling and drying it.

Herodotus describes Lake Mœris as 450 miles in circumference. These figures are probably not those of an ignorant copyist, but what the historian himself set down in his original manuscript, for he gives the measurement in schœni as well as in stadia. The statement, of course, is an impossibility, for the true Lake Mœris could not have been more than twenty miles in length, or more than four in width. No one can suppose that Herodotus is here drawing a long bow to astonish his countrymen with a traveller’s tale. If he had been at all capable of doing anything of this kind, he never could have written a book of such value as all competent judges have ever assigned to his great work; and whatever he might have written would soon have fallen into deserved contempt. It has occurred to me that we may explain his figures by supposing that he meant them to give the circumference of the whole water-system of the Faioum. On the southern ridge of the mussel-shell he saw the great Lake Mœris; along its northern side he saw what we distinguish by the name of Birket el Keiroon; he saw the eastern extremities of the two connected by a broad canal, and in like manner their western extremities; and throughout the intervening descent he found a complete network of irrigating canals. As he makes no separate mention of the Birket el Keiroon, the probability is that he considered it to be a part of Lake Mœris. Regarding, then, the two lakes as part of the same plan, and as equally the work of man, and finding them so intimately connected with canals, he looked upon the whole as one lake enclosing the cultivated Faioum, and so he speaks of the whole under a single name, and gives a measurement of the circumference of the whole as that of Lake Mœris. What he says of the difficulty he had in understanding what had become of the earth raised in excavating the lake would apply to Birket el Keiroon, supposing it to have been artificially formed. This is almost a demonstration of his having regarded it as a part of Lake Mœris. Of course there could have been no difficulty of this kind with respect to the true Lake Mœris, for that had not been formed at all by excavation, but by dykes: it was a great dam, or series of dams, and the earth required for the construction of the dykes was all the earth that had been moved. The difficulty, therefore, here must have been just the very opposite to that which occurred to Herodotus, because, before the water of the inundation had deposited any or much mud in the district, the problem the engineer had to solve was, where he was to get sufficient earth from to make the dykes.

Some travellers have spoken of the broad belt of shingly gravel on the south side of Birket el Keiroon, as a phenomenon that needs explanation. They ask—Where is the fertile soil that ought to be there? The answer, I suppose, is—That it may be found precisely where it ought to be, that is, at the bottom of the Birket el Keiroon. At times a great deal of water has passed through the canals, as formerly from Lake Mœris itself, into the Birket el Keiroon. This must have been very great on the occasion of such a mishap as a break in the dykes, which doubtless occurred at times, especially when things were going out of order. The beach, therefore, of the Birket el Keiroon has been very variable, having often been very considerably advanced. To whatever point the water rose, so far the wash of the waves, breaking on the beach, would float off the light particles of soil, and transport them to the quiet bottom of deep water. What there would be a difficulty in explaining would be, not the absence of, but the finding of Nile-mud soil in this belt that margins the Birket el Keiroon.

In some parts of the old bed of the now dry Lake Mœris we find deposits of Nile-mud sixty feet thick. Again, this is what might have been expected. The water of the inundation flowed into the lake heavily charged with mud. The lake was still water. The sediment, therefore, was speedily deposited at the bottom. This process was repeated every year. Say that a film of the fourth of an inch was deposited each year from Amenemha to Strabo, the whole of the sixty feet will be accounted for. But this deposition of mud must also have been going on during the antecedent unrecorded centuries of the morass-period.

This will also account for something more, that is, for the disuse and obliteration of the lake. The mud had at last taken the place of the water. The dykes had not been made of any great height at first, but, as the soil rose both within and on the outside, they had, in the course of two thousand years, been frequently raised correspondingly. Of course, the bed of the Nile, like that of the Po, gradually rises, but the amount of this rise is not great, and would bear but a small proportion to the rise of the bottom of the lake. Lake Mœris, therefore, contained in itself, as so many natural lakes have done, a suicidal element. What made it a lake was destined to make it one day, what it has long been, dry land. This was, from the first, only a question of time. Water could, of course, again at this day be dammed up upon the site of the old lake, but only by taking it from the river at a higher point than of old; higher, that is to say, than the inlet of the Bahr Jusuf Canal at the old Diospolis Parva; for instance, it might be necessary to take it now from above the Cataract of Philæ, though, indeed, if that could be engineered, we cannot suppose that it would pay, for the Faioum, including the bed of the old lake, is pretty well irrigated now, though, of course, it has no storage of water for the needs of the adjacent river-side lands.

It is obvious that we must connect with these vast and scientifically-carried-out hydraulic works of the Faioum, the registration of the height of the annual inundation Herodotus mentions, and of which we have still existing evidence in the rock-cut records at Semnéh, we referred to in our first chapter. He says this registration was commenced in the time of Mœris. Now Mœris was that Amenemha III., who constructed these great reservoirs of the Faioum, and after whom they were ever afterwards called. The connexion between the yearly marking of the height of the rising at Semnéh, in Nubia, and the reservoirs of the Faioum might have been that the register at Semnéh was a detective apparatus for showing how much water ought each year to have been brought into the reservoirs; it would also indicate what was the need for irrigation in the contiguous departments outside the Faioum; and thus be a guide for the regulation of the amount of water that ought to be let out each year.

In the waterworks of the Faioum there was a grand utility with which our thought is more than satisfied: in the Labyrinth was seen the architectural glory of the newly-created province; it was the greatest construction of the old Monarchy: the Pyramids had been a rude introduction to it; and it suggested to the younger monarchy the chief structures of Karnak. If we could now behold it, as it stood at the time when the Hyksos broke into Egypt to become its masters for between four and five centuries, we should regard it as one of the most historically interesting and instructive buildings ever erected in the world.

Its primary conception had been that of a place of assembly for the Parliaments of old Egypt. At that time one court, to which were attached 250 chambers, half being above, and half below ground, appears to have been assigned to each of the twenty-seven departments of the kingdom. Each of these chambers was roofed with a single stone slab. No material but stone had been used throughout the structure. Its pillars were monoliths of red granite, and of a limestone so white as to have been mistaken for Parian marble, and of so compact a texture as to receive a good polish. The sculptures of the courts and chambers were singularly bold and good. Those of each court, and its connected chambers, had reference to the history, the peculiarities, and the religion of the department to which it had been assigned. Besides the chambers were numerous halls, porticoes, and passages. The area of the roof, composed of the enormous slabs just mentioned, may have formed the actual place of assembly for the collected deputies of the departments. On the north side stood the Pyramid in which was buried Amenemha III., who, if he had not originally designed the Labyrinth, had, at all events, been its chief constructor, for his scutcheon is frequently found in the existing remains. This Pyramid was cased with the white limestone used in the Labyrinth itself. The dimensions of the figures sculptured upon it were unusually large. This form having been incorporated into the general design, for it was placed in front of the north, which was the open side, must have gone some way towards breaking the monotony of the horizontal and perpendicular lines of the Labyrinth itself.

Herodotus saw it after its partial restoration by the Dodecarchs. They had restored twelve of its courts, one for each of themselves. Those were days of decadence, when what would contribute to the greatness, not of the kingdom, but of the individual ruler, was the governing idea in royal minds. It had first fallen into decay, because into disuse, during the long period of Hyksos occupation; and on the rise of the new monarchy the place of assembly had been removed to Thebes, where Sethos had constructed his grand hypostyle hall for that very purpose. It had, therefore, at the time when the twelve kings took it in hand, been disused and dilapidated for a period of between fifteen and twenty centuries, probably for as long a time as has elapsed from the days of Augustus to our own day. In that long period we can imagine to what an extent it had been resorted to as a quarry for limestone, and building materials. This will account for the restorations of the twelve kings having been so considerable, that Herodotus speaks of them as having been the builders of the structure he saw.

Above two thousand years more have since elapsed, the whole of which have been years of neglect, and wilful dilapidation; and sad, indeed, is now the state of the grand building, once the grandest in all the world, upon which men had bestowed so much labour and thought, and of which those, to whom it belonged, had been so proud. An Arab canal has been carried through the centre of it. What remains is buried in the rubbish-heaps formed by its own overthrow and destruction. Still, there must be much within and beneath those heaps that might be disinterred. The whole ought to be carefully and critically examined. It is evident that these remains, from their extent and their connexion with the old monarchy, of which the original structure was the chief and most historical monument, are the most promising of all fields for Egyptological investigation.