Free Republic

The absence of monsoon rains at the source of the Nile was the cause of migrations and the demise of entire settlements in the late Roman province of Egypt...The oasis-like Faiyum region, roughly 130 km south-west of Cairo, was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Yet at the end of the third century CE, numerous formerly thriving settlements there declined and were ultimately abandoned by their inhabitants. Previous excavations and contemporary papyri have shown that problems with field irrigation were the cause. Attempts by local farmers to adapt to the dryness and desertification of the farmland - for example, by...

A cemetery containing more than a million mummified human bodies has been unearthed in central Egypt, according to archaeologists. Scientists have already excavated more than 1,700 mummies, preserved by the hot dry desert in the Faiyum region of Egypt about 60 miles (96km) south of Cairo. But those leading the work believe their could be up to a million similar bodies buried in shafts cut into the limestone rock that are at times up to 75ft (22.9 metres) deep.

I had the pleasure of joining an NBC expedition to Hawara on the edge of the Faiyum Oasis, Egypt. Researching a documentary about 2012, they wanted my comments on the fabled labyrinth located there... Herodotus (fifth century B.C.) and other Greek and Roman writers described a magnificent labyrinth in Egypt, containing three thousand rooms on two levels. Pliny the Elder (first century A.D.) related that the Egyptian labyrinth was already 3600 years old in his time. Since the nineteenth century, the Egyptian labyrinth has been identified with an area on the southern side of the Middle Kingdom pyramid of Amenemhet...