The Silver State

A Reservoir Supposed to Have Been Built by Joseph Discovered.

The European press published the statement three or four weeks ago that the Egyptian Minister of Public Works had decided to utilize the recent discovery of the bed of the ancient Lake Moeris. He wishes 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, accepted the offer made through C. Whitehouse to restore Lake Moeris by private enterprise to its ancient function of receiving and dispensing 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. It is all the more noteworthy because the fact that Lake Moeris ever existed has been denied for centuries. Linant 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 described as existing near Memphis, two, the Labyrinth and Lake Moeris, have been unknown to modern research. He and other ancient writers agreed in describing Lake Moeris as a reservoir of the Nile, 450 miles in circumference, 300 feet deep, and full of fish of twenty-two 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 salted 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 writers, have been freely charged with falsehood or exaggeration in what they wrote about Lake Moeris. C. Ptolemy placed the horn-shaped lake on his map at the very place where exists a great depression 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 century expunged it from his map, and it is only recently that it has reappeared on all the best maps. Chiefly through the researches of Linant, Whitehouse, and, last of all, Stadler, whose observations, completed in February, established the correctness of previous explorations, the world has at last been convinced that on 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 connected by the Bahr Yusuf, or canal of Joseph, and perhaps also by another artificial channel.

It is asserted by Mr. Whitehouse and the engineers in Egypt's service who accompanied him in his last journey in 1883 that the work of restoring the lake will prove comparatively easy. They estimate that during the time of the Nile's flood the basin can receive at least sixty million cubic meters of water a day; and that this volume shut up in a safe reservoir will avert all danger of the excessive inundations that afflict the fertile delta. From this reservoir also, when the Nile is low, water can be sent back to the river for the purposes of navigation or irrigation. They also assert that a vast amount of land now perpetually under water can, by means of this reservoir, be restored to 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.