ON THE CLIMATE OF EGYPT IN ANCIENT TIMES. 99 



Sahara inland sea would be very much contracted from 

 what it used to be. The ^reat dam at Silsilis had broken 

 through its barrier in prehistoric time, and apparently not 

 any attein23ts had been made to restore it, unless perhaps 

 on paper, as has been done in more modern times. 

 Amenemhat III has rendered himself immortal by having: 

 created an inland freshwater sea in a natural depression 

 in the Libyan Desert, not far from the Nile and quite 

 near to Memphis. Suffice it to say here that water was 

 conveyed to it from the Nile by means of a canal (the 

 Bahr Yousei of our day), and when the basin was filled, 

 it Avas said to be 450 miles in circumference, and at parts 

 350 feet deej). It Avas called by the Greeks Lake Moeris, 

 but in hieroglyphic language it was called Ta She — the lake 

 country.^ It continued to act as a reservoir for the Nile 

 surplus water, and to irrigate the country around till the 

 Roman period, when the dykes were neglected, the sluices 

 fell out of repair, and the water thus ran to waste ; so that in 

 the time of Pliny, 70 A.D., it was already dry, with the 

 exception of what still remains under the name of Birket-el- 

 Qoroon, or Lake of Horns, so named from the form of the 

 lake being like the shape of a pair of horns. Very naturally 

 this depression in the desert, after having been constantly 

 filled with the muddy Nile water, and partially emptied for 

 irrigation purposes, year after year for a period of nearly 

 2,400 years, is, now that it is dry, one of the richest provinces 

 of Egypt. Its present name " Fa'ioum " is simply the Coptic 

 name "Phiom" or "the Sea," carrying us back to the time 

 Avhen, instead of the 231,283 acres of rich arable and 

 cultivated land of to-day, this was a veritable sea. This 

 large body of water must have modified considerably the 

 climatic conditions in its neighbourhood; for we must not 

 forget that where we have freshwater to deal with in a 

 ■warm climate, we have always an abundance of trees and 

 vegetation that materially and sensibly affect the temperature 

 and rainfall.'^ The Fa'ioum now is a malarious districts 

 but more especially in the vicinity of Lake Qoroon which is 

 brackish, and the rainfall is almost nil throughout the whole 

 of this region.'' 



Amenemhat III died about 2266 B.C., and was succeeded 

 by a number of kings of little account as far as this paper 

 is concerned, till about 2200 B.C., the fourth Pharaoh of the 

 Xlllth dynasty made a record on the Nilometer at Semneh, 

 showing that the cataract there was still holding out; yet 



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