Prehistory During the
Messinian Salinity Crisis of the late
Miocene, the
Nile flowed past the empty Faiyum basin at the bottom of a large
canyon which reached some deep where the city of
Cairo now sits. Although the mechanism of the Faiyum basin's creation was subject to some scholarly debate among
geologists in the early 20th century, the consensus view remains that the basin itself emerged primarily as a consequence of
wind erosion. After the
Mediterranean re-flooded at the end of the Miocene, the Nile canyon became a gulf of the sea which extended inland to the site of present-day
Kom Ombo. Over the course of geological time this inlet of the Mediterranean gradually filled with silt and became the
Nile valley. Sometime prior to the
Middle Paleolithic, the silt of the Nile valley accumulated enough for the flooding Nile to overflow into the Faiyum basin through the Hawara Channel, creating the ancient Lake Moeris; this earliest iteration of the lake was fed solely by subsequent, intermittent floods of the Nile, and is thought to have dried up entirely at the end of the
Paleolithic before reappearing at the beginning of the
Neolithic.
Initial development: Old and Middle Kingdoms Lake Moeris is first recorded from about 3000 , around the time of
Narmer (
Menes). By the beginning of the
Old Kingdom a permanent settlement, Shedet, had been erected on the high ground of the lake's southeastern bank; Shedet would go on to become the major cult center of the
Egyptian god Sobek, an association which would lead to the city receiving the Greek name of
Krokodeilópolis (Κροκοδειλόπολις, lit. "Crocodile City"), later rendered in
Latin as
Crocodīlopolis. The modern city of
Faiyum now occupies the site. The first major manmade alterations to Lake Moeris occurred during the
Middle Kingdom under the kings of the
Twelfth Dynasty, who ruled from the Faiyum region following the move to the new royal capital of
Itjtawy.
Senusret II initiated
irrigation and
land reclamation projects to free up portions of the lake interior for agricultural use, pushing the edge of the lake further outwards from Shedet. In addition to its role as a freshwater reservoir, the lake was also used as part of a freight transport system; basalt blocks mined from a nearby quarry were conveyed to the lake via the
Lake Moeris Quarry Road, the oldest known paved road in the world. From the lake, the blocks could be shipped to the
Giza Necropolis to be used in the construction of temples and monuments. The
ASCE has entered the Quarry Road into its
List of Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks. File:Lake Moeris.jpg|thumb|500px|right|An
image map of notable monuments in the vicinity of the former Lake Moeris. The hatched area denotes land reclaimed by the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty. rect 718 628 871 711
Abgig obelisk rect 936 453 1207 509
Pedestals of Biahmu rect 858 548 1148 607
Crocodilopolis rect 999 699 1260 744
Pyramid of Amenemhat III at Hawara rect 1108 755 1397 833
Pyramid of Senusret II rect 1398 476 1620 1122
Nile River desc none In his book
Histories, the Greek historian
Herodotus claims to have visited Lake Moeris, situating it below the
Labyrinth of Egypt and opposite the ancient city of
Crocodilopolis (i.e., the modern city of Faiyum). Herodotus also states that two "pyramids" (interpreted to be the
Pedestals of Biahmu) stood in the middle of the lake, a claim that led the British
Egyptologist Flinders Petrie to hypothesize that the lake was flooded when Herodotus had visited the area. The immense waterworks undertaken by the kings of the
Twelfth Dynasty to transform the lake into a freshwater reservoir left classical geographers such as Herodotus with the impression that the lake itself was an artificial excavation – an interpretation not borne out by modern evidence.
Later development: Ptolemaic Kingdom and Roman Egypt Following the death of
Alexander the Great, Egypt came under the control of his former general
Ptolemy, who would become the first king of the
Ptolemaic dynasty. With this new governance and the concurrent influx of Greek and Macedonian colonists into Egypt, the Faiyum basin and Lake Moeris was developed further to enhance its capacity as an agricultural center. The royal engineers of
Ptolemy II Philadelphus constructed additional canals and levees, as well as a dam on the Bahr Yussef to regulate the inflow of the Nile, allowing for further settlement of the basin and increased grain production as the lake's waters receded and exposed new fertile soils. The impeded flow of the Nile into Lake Moeris following the construction of the dam marked the beginning of the lake's gradual evaporative shrinkage, a process that would ultimately result in the diminished Lake Qarun of the modern era. By the end of the
Ptolemaic Kingdom, routine maintenance of this irrigation system had been neglected due to internal strife, causing croplands within the Faiyum to either dry up or become totally inundated. The
annexation of Egypt as a Roman province saw the renovation of Lake Moeris' hydraulic works by Roman troops under
Augustus, thereby contributing to Egypt's status as the
breadbasket of the early
Roman Empire. The revitalization of agriculture within the Faiyum was met with another wave of settlement and the area saw sustained productivity until the
Crisis of the Third Century, when another civil war destabilized the region and the irrigation system once again fell into disrepair. Following this period of unrest the emperor
Probus, much like Augustus, employed Roman soldiers to re-renovate the canals and dykes and the area became productive once again, though over time the systems were yet again neglected and the Roman settlements became defunct; the area is thought to have been mostly abandoned by the 5th century, with only a small area in the interior of the Faiyum basin remaining cultivated and inhabited through the remainder of the
Middle Ages. == Ecology and fisheries ==