Fayum
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Fayum. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
or Fayoum, a district of ancient Egypt lying west of the Nile and southwest of Cairo. It is a circular basin about thirty miles in diameter. It lies below the surface of the Libyan desert, and is connected with the valley of the Nile by a narrow pass threaded by an ancient canal. It was and is well watered. It contains about 500 square miles and sustains a population of a quarter of a million persons. Lake Birket lies in the northwestern part. Herodotus described a vast reservoir thirty miles in circumference, used to store the waters of the Nile, Lake Moeris, he called it. The closest examination fails to locate the embankment of any such lake satisfactorily. It is believed he may have visited the country in a time of overflow and have been deceived by local dikes. The soil produces crops of wheat, flax, hemp, rice, cotton, and sugar-cane; orchard fruits, including oranges, peaches, pomegranates, olives, figs, and grapes are abundant. Roses grow luxuriantly. Garden vegetables are plentiful. Archaeological finds of great antiquity have been located in the Fayum. A famous palace, known as the Labyrinth, has given up many treasures. See Egypt ; Nile
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
FAYOUM, or FAIOUM (fa-yoom'), a famous valley and province of central Egypt, anciently the name of Arsinoë, and stretching out into the desert, which almost entirely surrounds it. In extent, its length may be taken at 40 miles by a width of 30. It is the most fertile of the Egyptian provinces and produces dhurra, rye, barley, flax, cotton, sugar, grapes, olives, figs, etc. Near the capital (Medinet-el-Fayum) large quantities of roses are cultivated, Vol. IV-Cyc-H and are converted into rose water which is highly esteemed. The land capable of cultivation in Fayum is about 493 square miles. Manufactures woolen, linen, and cotton goods. In ancient times, the Fayum contained the artificial lake MOERIS (q. v.) and a famous labyrinth.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's puzzled in 1910 that "the closest examination fails to locate the embankment" of Herodotus's Lake Moeris; scholars now take Moeris to have been the natural lake filling the depression, fed and regulated through the Bahr Yusuf channel, with the shrunken, salty Birket Qarun as its remnant, and the Labyrinth identified with the ruined, heavily quarried temple site beside Amenemhat III's pyramid at Hawara. Neither entry mentions what the Fayum is now best known for outside Egypt: the Roman-era painted mummy portraits, dug there in quantity from the 1880s and now scattered through museums worldwide, and the papyri that came from its rubbish mounds. Excavation in the 1920s and 1930s established the "Fayum A" Neolithic farming culture as among the earliest in Egypt, and the desert northwest of the lake yielded fossil beds that made the region central to the study of early primates and of whales; Wadi al-Hitan, the Valley of the Whales, became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005. The province is still Egypt's garden, but the quarter-million people Aiton's counted have become some three and a half million.
Written for this edition, 2026.