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The Faiyum Depression*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

John Ball*
Affiliation:
Survey of Egypt

Extract

With the publication of Sir Hanbury Brown’s Fayoum and Lake Moeris in 1892, it was widely believed that the problem of the situation and extent of the Lake Moeris of antiquity had been finally solved. Sir Hanbury Brown pointed out that the shore-lines of an ancient lake could be traced in the Faiyum at a level of about 22 metres above sea; he concluded that this lake, which must have covered almost the whole of what is now the Faiyum province of Egypt, was the ancient Lake Moeris, and that the remarkable gravelly ridge known as the ‘Idwa Bank was the remains of an artificial embankment which had served to reclaim from the lake a comparatively small area around the present town of Medinet-el-Faiyum. Sir Hanbury Brown’s views received ready acceptance, because whilst satisfying all the modern levelling and other observations which had up to that time been made, they were also in tolerable accord with the account of Lake Moeris given by Herodotus and copied by subsequent classical writers.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1930

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References

* (I). RECENT Work on THE PROBLEM OF LAKE MOERIS. By Miss Gertrude Caton-Thompson and Miss E. W. Gardner. Geographical Journal, January 1929, pp. 20–60, with sketch-maps, a time-level graph, and other illustrations.

(2). PALAEOLITHIC MAN AND THE NILE-FAIYUM DIVIDE: a study of the Region during Pliocene and Pleistocene times. By K. S. Sandford and W. J. Arkell. University of Chicago Press, December 1929, pp. xv, .77, with II plates, 25 textillustrations and a coloured map. 22s 6d.

We have also received the following paper which is not dealt with in the review here printed:–‘The Pliocene and Pleistocene deposits of Wadi Qena and of the Nile Valley between Luxor and Assiut (Qau)’. By Kenneth Stuart Sandford Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. 1929, LXXXV, 493–548, maps and plates.—EDITOR.