Lake Moeris

An image map of the notable monuments surrounding ancient lake Moeris. The shaded part shows the land reclaimed by the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty.

When the Mediterranean Sea was a hot dry hollow near the end of the Messinian Salinity Crisis in the late Miocene, Faiyum was a dry hollow, and the Nile flowed past it at the bottom of a canyon (2,400 m deep or more where Cairo is now). After the Mediterranean reflooded at the end of the Miocene, the Nile canyon became an arm of the sea reaching inland farther than Aswan. Over geological time that sea arm gradually filled with silt and became the Nile valley.

Eventually, the Nile valley bed silted up high enough to let the flooding Nile overflow into the Faiyum hollow, making a lake in it. The lake is first recorded from about 3000 BC, around the time of Menes (Narmer); however, for the most part it would only be filled with high flood waters. The lake was bordered by neolithic settlements, and the town of Shedet grew up on the south where the higher ground created a ridge.

In 2300 BC, the waterway from the Nile to the natural lake was widened and deepened to make a canal that now is known as the Bahr Yussef. This project was started by Amenemhat III or perhaps by his father Senusret III. This canal fed into the lake. This was meant to serve three purposes: control the flooding of the Nile, regulate the water level of the Nile during dry seasons, and serve the surrounding area with irrigation. There is evidence of ancient Egyptian pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty using the natural lake of Faiyum as a reservoir to store surpluses of water for use during the dry periods.

At the lake there are the remainders of the oldest known paved road in the world, the Lake Moeris Quarry Road, that helped transport basalt blocks from a quarry nearby to the lake, from where they could be shipped to the Giza Necropolis. The American Society of Civil Engineers has entered it into its List of Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks.[3][4]

In his work Histories, Herodotus claims to have visited the lake, situating it below the Labyrinth of Egypt and opposite Crocodilopolis (i.e., the modern city of Fayyum).[5] In this work, the author also claims that "two pyramids" (that is, the Pedestals of Biahmu) stood in the middle of the lake[6]—a claim that led the British Egyptologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie to hypothesize that the lake had flooded when Herodotus had visited the area.[7]

The immense waterworks undertaken by the ancient Egyptian pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty to transform the lake into a huge water reservoir gave the impression that the lake was an artificial excavation, as reported by geographers and travelers during classical times.[8] However, as the Classicist Alan B. Lloyd notes, this is erroneous: "The Fayum basin is a natural formation created by wind erosion. The lake was created when an offshoot of the Nile, now known as the Bahr Yusuf, broke through the western cliffs and flooded the lower part of the basin."[9]

mer-wer (Moeris)
Egyptian hieroglyphs

The name "Lake Moeris" is derived from the Greek translation (i.e., "Limne Moeris" Μοῖρῐς λίμνη) of the Egyptian place-name mr-wr, which means "Great Canal".[10] The canal in question was likely the Bahr Yussef, and as the pharaoh responsible for its construction, Amenemhat III was referred to by the Greek as "King Moeris".[10][11] During the time of Late Egyptian, the lake was referred to as the Piôm, a name derived from the Egyptian phrase pꜣ-ym (lit. "the Sea").[12][13]

• Fayum Project, University of Leuven
• The Hydraulics of Open Channel Flow: An Introduction

Attribution

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Griffith, Francis Llewellyn (1911). "Moeris, Lake of". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

• "Mœris" . Encyclopedia Americana. 1920.
• "Mœris" . The American Cyclopædia. 1879.