This relates to the archaelogy work conducted at the dry lake west of the nile by a few hundred kilometers. The links below are from different historical eras.
http://news.discovery.com/earth/ancient-egypt-mega-lake.html
Sunkenciv pinged a thread discussing that lake recently.
Shuttle images reveal Egypt’s lost great lake
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2636761/posts
· 12/03/2010 4:09:49 AM PST ·
· Posted by SunkenCiv ·
· 26 replies ·
· Science News ·
· Wednesday, November 24th, 2010 ·
· Alexandra Witze ·
Radar images taken from the space shuttle confirm that a lake broader than Lake Erie once sprawled a few hundred kilometers west of the Nile, researchers report in the December issue of Geology. Since the lake first appeared around 250,000 years ago, it would have ballooned and shrunk until finally petering out around 80,000 years ago... Since then, desert winds have eroded and sands have buried much of the region’s landscape, says Maxine Kleindienst, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto. But during next summer’s field season, she and her colleagues will be checking for ancient shorelines at the elevations...
older thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2579098/posts
The Lost City: A discovery in the desert could rewrite the history of ancient Egypt
Yale Alumni Magazine ^ | September/October 2010 | Heather Pringle
The HistoriesThus from Egypt as far as Lake Tritonis Libya is inhabited by wandering tribes, whose drink is milk and their food the flesh of animals. Cow's flesh, however, none of these tribes ever taste, but abstain from it for the same reason as the Egyptians, neither do they any of them breed swine. Even at Cyrene, the women think it wrong to eat the flesh of the cow, honouring in this Isis, the Egyptian goddess, whom they worship both with fasts and festivals. The Barcaean women abstain, not from cow's flesh only, but also from the flesh of swine.
by Herodotus
Book IV -- Melpomene
tr by George Rawlinson
West of Lake Tritonis the Libyans are no longer wanderers, nor do they practise the same customs as the wandering people, or treat their children in the same way. For the wandering Libyans, many of them at any rate, if not all -- concerning which I cannot speak with certainty -- when their children come to the age of four years, burn the veins at the top of their heads with a flock from the fleece of a sheep: others burn the veins about the temples. This they do to prevent them from being plagued in their after lives by a flow of rheum from the head; and such they declare is the reason why they are so much more healthy than other men. Certainly the Libyans are the healthiest men that I know; but whether this is what makes them so, or not, I cannot positively say -- the healthiest certainly they are. If when the children are being burnt convulsions come on, there is a remedy of which they have made discovery. It is to sprinkle goat's water upon the child, who thus treated, is sure to recover. In all this I only repeat what is said by the Libyans.