What he took for the shores of this lake were the embankments which divided it into basins and acted as highways between the various towns.

His narrative, repeated by the classic authors, has been accepted by the moderns; and Egypt, neither accepting nor rejecting it, was gratified long after date with the reputation of a gigantic work which would in truth have been the glory of her civil engineers, if it had ever existed.

I do not believe that "Lake Moeris" ever did exist.

The only works of the kind which the Egyptians undertook were much less pretentious.
These consist of stone-built dams erected at the mouths of many of those lateral ravines, or wadys, which lead down from the mountain ranges into the valley of the Nile.

One of the most important among them was pointed out, in 1885, by Dr.Schweinfurth, at a distance of about six miles and a half from the Baths of Helwan, at the mouth of the Wady Gerraweh (fig.