Idaho County free press. [volume] (Grangeville, Idaho Territory) 1886-current, 1886-09-03
LAKE MORRIS. -,
Repetition of a Great Engineering Enter
prise Carried Out by Joseph.

Repetition of a Great Engineering Enter
prise Carried Out by Joseph.
The European press published the
statement three or four weeks ago that
the Egyptian Minister of Public Works
had decided to utilize the recent dis
covery of the bed of ancient Lake
Moeris. He wished to rebuild the old
canal that nearly four thousand years
ago was dug between the basin and the
Nile, and make this great depression
about sixty miles southwest of Cairo
once more the reservoir for the surplus
waters of the Nile at flood. He has,
therefore, declined the offer made
through Mr. Whtehouse to restore
Lake Moeris by private enterprise to its
ancient function of receiving and dis
pensng the waters of the Nile.
This is a proposal to repeat in modern
times great engineering enterprise
which the patriarch Joseph is said by
some authorities to have carried out 1t
is all the more noteworthy because the
fact that Lake Moeris ever existed has
been denied for centuries. Linaut some
forty years ago revived the notion that
Herodotus told the truth after all, but
not until 1882 did the best geographical
authorities agree that there was once a
Lake Moeris, and that its ancient bed
had been found.
OF the wonders that Herodotus de-
scribed as existing near Memphis, two,
the Labyrinth and Lake Moeris, have
been unknown to modern research. He
and other ancient writers agreed to de-
scribing Lake Moeris, as a reservoir of
the Nile, four hundred and fifty miles
in circumference, three hundred feet
deep and full of fish of twenty-five
species. There were dykes at the mouths
of the canal by which the engineers
stored up or distributed its water sup
ply. The lake was mostly bordered by
the desert. On its banks lived multi
tudes of fishermen, who caught and
sailed the fish that bred freely in the
lake, which owed its existence to one
or more artificial channels connecting
it with the Nile.
Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus, Pliny
and other Greek and Latin writer's have
been freely charged with falsehood or
exaggeration in what they wrote about
Lake Moerie c. Ptolemy placed the
horn-shaped lake on his map at the
very place where exists the great de-
preston OF similar shape to which it is
now assigned. Some copies of his map,
however, did not contain the lake, and
editors of Ptolemy in the fifteenth cen
tnry expurged it from his map, and ii
is only recently that it has reappeared
on ali the best maps. Chiefly through
the researches of Linaut, Whitehouse,
and, last of all. .Stadler, whose observa-
tons completed in February established
the correctness of previous explorations,
the world has at last been convinced
that on the southern edge of the Fay.
cum exists great depression, which is
three hundred feet below the level o.
the river, and is separated by chair
of hills from the Nile, with which it was
once connected by the Bahr Josuf, OIL
Canal of Joseph, and perhaps also by
another artificial channel.
1t is asserted by Mr. Whitehouse ant
the engineers in Egypt's service who &C
companied him in his last journey il
1883 that the work of restoring the lake
will prove comparatively easy. They
estimate that during the time of thu
Niles flood the basin can receive a
least 60, 900. 900 cubic metres of water
day; and that this volume, shut up in ;
safe reservoir, will avert all danger o
the excessive foundations that Attic
the fertile delta. From this reservoir
also, when the Nile is low, water can b
sent back to the river for purposes c
navigation or irrigation. They also as
sert that a vast amount of land nov
perpetually under water can, by mean
of this reservoir. be restored to agricu
ture; that the big lakes around Alexar
dria will thus be drained, and the Mec
iterranean shores of Egypt will agai
resemble the mouths of the Rhine an