Brown has lately shown
that the nucleus of "Lake Moeris" was the Birket el Kurun.[8] This was
known to the Egyptians as _Miri, Mi-uri,_ the Great Lake, whence the Greeks
derived their _Moiris_ a name extended also to the inundation of the Fayum.
If Herodotus did actually visit this province, it was probably in summer,
at the time of the high Nile, when the whole district presents the
appearance of an inland sea. What he took for the shores of this lake were
the embankments which divided it into basins and acted as highways between
the various towns. His narrative, repeated by the classic authors, has
been accepted by the moderns; and Egypt, neither accepting nor rejecting
it, was gratified long after date with the reputation of a gigantic work
which would in truth have been the glory of her civil engineers, if it had
ever existed. I do not believe that "Lake Moeris" ever did exist. The only
works of the kind which the Egyptians undertook were much less pretentious.
These consist of stone-built dams erected at the mouths of many of those
lateral ravines, or wadys, which lead down from the mountain ranges into
the valley of the Nile. One of the most important among them was pointed
out, in 1885, by Dr. Schweinfurth, at a distance of about six miles and a
half from the Baths of Helwan, at the mouth of the Wady Gerraweh (fig. 47).
It answered two purposes, firstly, as a means of storing the water of the
inundation for the use of the workmen in the neighbouring quarries; and,
secondly, as a barrier to break the force of the torrents which rush down
from the desert after the heavy rains of springtime and winter. The ravine
measures about 240 feet in width, the sides being on an average from 40 to
50 feet in height. The dam, which is 143 feet in thickness, consists of
three layers of material; at the bottom, a bed of clay and rubble; next, a
piled mass of limestone blocks (A); lastly, a wall of cut stone built in
retreating stages, like an enormous flight of steps (B). Thirty-two of the
original thirty-five stages are yet _in situ_, and about one-fourth part of
the dam remains piled up against the sides of the ravine to right and left;
but the middle part has been swept away by the force of the torrent (fig.
48). A similar dike transformed the end of Wady Genneh into a little lake
which supplied the Sinaitic miners with water.

Most of the localities from which the Egyptians derived their metals and
choicest materials in hard st