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After the equinox but not until June 23 1827, Hay and Lane, and presumably Kalitza, set sail for Upper Egypt and Nubia. Two day's sailing brought them to Beni Soueif at midmorning, where they left the boat to make an excursion into the Fayyum, the large, intensely fertile area to the west of the Nile. Passing through a break in the western valley escarpment, it then flows down into the Fayyum, one of several large depressions that dot the Western Desert of Egypt. At the other end of the passage through the hills, Lane made a much more careful examination of the Pyramid of Hawara. It had once been cased with limestone and had likewise slumped into ruin when the casing stone was stripped, exposing its mud brick core, yet retaining an impressive appearance.

The village of Kerkeosiris, in the southern part of the Fayyum (the ancient Arsinoite nome) can be studied in detail and with statistics thanks to the survival of several land registers from the late second century BCE. Although these omit non-landholders (craftsmen, hired workers, small businessmen), they show much of the village society very clearly. Particularly interesting are mentions of cavalrymen (with relatively large allotments) farming the land themselves and thus more present in the countryside than absentee landowners; but this is far less common with the Greek cavalrymen than with the Egyptian soldiers who have much smaller plots.

This chapter discusses the geography and history of Egypt. It covers the Nile; irrigation and water distribution; flora and fauna; the Fayyūm oasis; the pre-Islamic political and administrative structure; political and administrative developments; the Egyptian economy; and relations between Arabia and Egypt.

This chapter examines the history of irrigation and irrigation repairs in and around the Egyptian town of Fayyum to show how a shared reliance on natural resource management bound together extremely rural regions of the Ottoman Empire such as Fayyum with centers of power in Istanbul and Cairo. Its focus on irrigation reveals how the center-periphery model of early modern empires fails to capture the complexity of relationships that rural regions of the Ottoman Empire maintained with other provinces and towns both in the empire and beyond. Water in Fayyum grew food that forged connections of commodity movement with areas of the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Moreover, through an examination of such intraimperial and transregional ties, this chapter furthers the argument that Egyptian peasants held much of the power in these early modern relationships.

The subject of this chapter is four Greek hymns by Isidorus (perhaps around 100 BCE) found inscribed on a gateway of the temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis-Hermouthis at Narmouthis/Medinet Madi in the Fayyum. Three of the hymns are to the goddess herself, the fourth is in praise of Amenemhat III/Porramanres, the founder of the temple. The chapter shows how four hymns mediate in different ways between a broader universalizing Greek perspective and a narrower more local Egyptian one, and it relates their specific cultural affinities to their spatial position in the temple.

Carved out millions of years before mankind reached its coasts, the Mediterranean Sea became a ‘sea between the lands’ linking opposite shores once human beings traversed its surface in search of habitation, food or other vital resources. Early types of humans inhabited the lands bordering the Mediterranean 435,000 years before the present, to judge from evidence for a hunters’ camp set up near modern Rome; others built a simple hut out of branches at Terra Amata near Nice, and created a hearth in the middle of their dwelling – their diet included rhinoceros and elephant meat as well as deer, rabbits and wild pigs. When early man first ventured out across the sea’s waters is uncertain. In 2010, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens announced the discovery in Crete of quartz hand-axes dated to before 130,000 BC, indicating that early types of humans found some means to cross the sea, though these people may have been swept there unintentionally on storm debris. Discoveries in caves on Gibraltar prove that 24,000 years ago another species of human looked across the sea towards the mountain of Jebel Musa, clearly visible on the facing shore of Africa: the first Neanderthal bones ever discovered, in 1848, were those of a woman who lived in a cave on the side of the Rock of Gibraltar. Since the original finds were not immediately identified as the remains of a different human species, it was only when, eight years later, similar bones were unearthed in the Neander Valley in Germany that this species gained a name: Neanderthal Man should carry the name Gibraltar Woman. The Gibraltar Neanderthals made use of the sea that lapped the shores of their territory, for their diet included shellfish and crustaceans, even turtles and seals, though at this time a flat plain separated their rock caves from the sea. But there is no evidence for a Neanderthal population in Morocco, which was colonized by homo sapiens sapiens, our own branch of humanity. The Straits apparently kept the two populations apart.