, 1886-07-01
THE LAKE THAT JOSEPH MADE.
Recent Discovery of the Bed Of an An
Client Reservoir Of the Nile.

Recent Discovery of the Bed of an An.
client Reservoir Of the Nile.
The European press published the
statement recently that the Egyptian
minister of public works had decided to
utilize the recent discovery Of the bed of
ancient Lake Moeris. He wishes to re-
build the old canal that nearly 1000
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.. G. Whitehouse to restore
Lake Moeris by private enterprise to its
ancient function of receiving and dis
pensing the waters of the Nile.
This is a proposal to repeat in modern
times a 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 & 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
LAX Moeris, and that its ancient bed
had been found.
OF the wonders that Herodotus des-
cribed as existing near Memphis, two,
the Labyrinth and Lake Moeris, have
been unknown to modern research. He
and other ancient writers agreed in des-
cribing Lake Moeris, as a reservoir of the
Nile, 450 miles in circumference, 800 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 supply.
The lake was mostly bordered by the
desert. On its banks lived multitudes of
fishermen, who caught and sailed the
fish that bred freely in the lake, which
owed its existence to one or more arti-
fetal channels connecting it with the
Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus, Pliny,
and other Greek and Latin writers have
been freely charged with falsehood or
exaggeration in what they wrote about
Lake Moeris. G. Ptolemy placed the
h~orn-shaped lake on his map at the very
place where exists the great depression
of similar shape to which it is now as
signed. Some copies of his map, how
ever, did not contain the lake, and ed
itors of Ptolemy in the fifteenth century
expurged it from his maps. Chiefly
through the researches of I~ine-s, Thite-
house, and, last of all, Stadler, whose OBJ
%servations completed in February estab-
lished the correctness of previous *
plorations. tho world has at last been
cop-inced that the southern edge of the
Fayoum exists a great depression, which
is 300 feet below the level of the river,
and is separated by a chain of hills from
the Nile, with which it was once con-
nected by the Bahr Josuf or canal of
Joseph. and perhaps also by another
artificial channel.
1t is asserted by Mr.. Whitehouse and
the engineers in Egypt's service who ac-
companied him in his last Journey in
1888 that the work of restoring the lake
will prove comparatively easy. They
estimate that during the time of the
Niles flood the basin can receive co.
900. 900 cubic meters of waters a day,
and thai this volume, shut up in a safe
reservoir, will avert all danger of the
excessive foundations that af1ict the
fertile delta. From this reservoir also,
when the Nile is low, water can be sent
back to the river for purposes of navigar
ton or irrigation. They also ASSERT that
a vast amount of land now p%erpetually
under water can, by means of this reser-
voir, be restoseSto agriculture; that the
big lakes around Alexandria will thus
be drained, and the Mediterranean shores
of Egypt will again resemble the mouths
of the Rhine and the coast of Holland.-
New York Sun.