3-082-393 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The River of Joseph and the Fayoum, 1895. '1. Birket el-Qerun. 2. Waterfall at Tamieh. 3. Intake of the Bahr Jusuf. 4. Ancient Temple in the Desert. 5. Mill in the Bats, 6. The Bahr Jusuf, or River of Joseph. 7. Waterwheel and Aqueduct. Egyptian scenery...unknown to the tourist...a large canal, the Bahr Jusuf...bears the name of the Patriarch Joseph...Passing between the fertility which it produces and the desert of unconquerable sterility, it traverses the Libyan Hills, and yields up its waters to innumerable canals in the semi-oasis of the Fayoum. One of the streamlets enters a strange gorge known as El Bats...The water that turned the corn-mill and the water-wheel, formerly lifting, by jars tied between its paddles, the supply for a high-level aqueduct, flows onward to Tamieh...Some miles distant, in the desert, stands a lonely temple whose antiquity is unknown, but which some archaeologists believe to be as old as the Sphinx...It is 300 ft. above the lake...[and] is of special interest, because it seems to prove that the Birket el-Qerun, now covering about eighty square miles, filled, at the time of Herodotus, the whole of this vast depression; so that the temple stood at the water's edge'. From photographs by Mr. Cope Whitehouse published in "Illustrated London News", 1895.