When the
Mediterranean Sea was a hot, dry hollow near the end of the
Messinian Salinity Crisis in the late
Miocene, Faiyum was also a dry hollow, and the
Nile flowed past it at the bottom of a
canyon, which was deep or more where
Cairo is today. 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 Nile periodically overflow into the Faiyum Hollow, forming a lake. 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.
Neolithic settlements bordered the lake, and the town of Crocodilopolis (now
Faiyum) grew up on the south where the higher ground created a ridge. In 2300 BC, the waterway connecting the Nile River to the natural lake was widened and deepened to make a canal now known as the
Bahr Yussef. This canal, which fed into the lake, was meant to serve three purposes: controlling the flooding of the Nile, regulating the water level of the Nile during dry seasons, and serving the surrounding area with irrigation. There is evidence the
pharaohs of the
Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt used the natural lake of Faiyum as a reservoir to store surpluses of water for use during the dry periods. The immense waterworks undertaken by the ancient Egyptian pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty to transform the lake into a vast water reservoir gave the impression that the lake was an artificial excavation, as classic geographers and travellers reported. The lake was eventually abandoned due to the nearest branch of the Nile dwindling in size from 230 BC. Faiyum was known to the
ancient Egyptians as the twenty-first
nome of
Upper Egypt,
Atef-Pehu ("Northern Sycamore"). Its capital was Sh-d-y-t (usually written "Shedyt"), known to the Greeks as
Crocodilopolis, and renamed by
Ptolemy II Philadelphus as Arsinoe. This region has the earliest evidence for farming in Egypt, and was a center of royal pyramid and tomb-building in the Twelfth Dynasty of the
Middle Kingdom, and again during the rule of the
Ptolemaic Kingdom. Faiyum became one of the breadbaskets of the
Roman world. For the first three centuries AD, the people of Faiyum and elsewhere in
Roman Egypt not only
embalmed their dead but also placed a portrait of the deceased over the face of the mummy wrappings, shroud or case. The Egyptians continued their practice of burying their dead, despite the Roman preference for
cremation. Preserved by the dry desert environment, these
Fayum mummy portraits make up the richest body of portraiture to have survived from antiquity. They provide a window into a society of peoples of mixed origins—Egyptians,
Greeks, Romans,
Syrians,
Libyans and others—that flourished 2000 years ago in the Faiyum. The Faiyum portraits were painted on wood in a pigmented
wax technique called
encaustic painting.,
View of Medinet El-Fayoum, c. 1868–1870|357x357px In the late
1st millennium, the arable area shrank. Settlements around the edge of the basin were abandoned. These sites include some of the best-preserved from the late
Roman Empire, notably
Karanis, and from the
Byzantine and early
Arab Periods, though recent redevelopment has greatly reduced the archaeological features. In addition to the mummy portraits, the villages of the Faiyum have also proven to be a source of
papyrus fragments containing literature and documents in
Latin, Greek, and Egyptian scripts. "Colonial-type" village names (villages named after towns elsewhere in Egypt and places outside Egypt) show that much land was brought into cultivation in the Faiyum in the Greek and Roman periods. According to the
Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, in 1910 over 1,000 km2 (400 mile2) of the Faiyum Oasis was cultivated, the chief crops being
cereals and
cotton. The completion of the
Aswan Low Dam ensured a supply of water, which enabled 20,000 acres (80 km2) of land, previously unirrigated and untaxed, to be brought under cultivation in the years 1903–1905. Three crops were obtained in twenty months. The province was noted for its
figs,
grapes, and
olives.
Rose trees were numerous, and most of the
attar of roses (rose oil) of Egypt was manufactured in the province. Faiyum also raised its own variety of
sheep. ==Archaeology==