Oasis of Faiyum in Ancient Egypt and Rome

Featured here is an evening sky shot of Faiyum, which for millennia was an important oasis in Egypt and definitely a place on my bucket list to see one day. The region preserves an unusual amount of evidence from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Two recurring themes emerge from these sources — the concern with death and a belief in magic and sorcery.

Legends about the oasis of Faiyum — with a lake sometimes referred to as the “Great Water,” and also known as Lake Moeris — were passed down over two thousand years by the time the Romans had conquered the region. The Pharaoh Amenemhat I had built it up in a pre-existing oasis, and although later rulers let the waters drain, Faiyum continued to retain greenery, and peoples influenced by Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilizations made their way to its fresh waters.

The practice of mummification continued into the Roman period, and Faiyum became the epicenter of the production of realistic portraiture, paintings of wealthy Egyptians that adorned the mummies. You can see an example of a Faiyum Mummy portrait in the second image, with the likeness of the deceased almost photographic — the gaze of the man would have stared up from his coffin, showing the viewers what he would have looked like in life.

Faiyum is also the likely location of an Egyptian myth recorded in the mid-first century called “Setna II,” which features a magician hero and his successful journeys to the land of the dead.

In one adventure, the magician Si-Osire shows his father a vision in the land of the dead in which a man who had been poor in life is treated gloriously, while a formerly rich man suffers. Si-Osire tells his father the reason for such treatment, which lies in the fact that in life, the poor man had been beneficent, but the wealth man’s faults had outweighed his good deeds. The idea of the poor eventually having a happier afterlife is also in the New Testament Gospels, such as featured in the Beatitudes.

I like the way that Faiyum had become legendary even in Ancient Roman times, and the way that the physical oasis that generated life was also a cultural oasis, generating stories important to so many cultures thereafter.