Here are a few quotations from Hewison's book about the Faiyum.

Back cover:

"The Fayoum, a large and exceptionally fertile depression in Egypt's Western Desert, some 90 kilometers southwest of Cairo, is a region both rich in history and outstanding in natural beauty."

"Its historical legacy includes temples, pyramids, and towns from the Middle Kingdom and the Ptolemaic [Greek] Period, as well as churches, monestaries, and mosques from later times. Its farmland, watered by the region's landmark waterwheels, is among the most generous in Egypt, and its landscape is varied and beautiful."

"The large and ancient Birkat Qarun [a lake] nestles in the north between the soft green land and the harsh but dramatic desert scarp, while two new lakes, connected by Egypt's only waterfalls, have been created in the once barren Wadi al-Rayyan to the west, bringing fishermen, farmers, and tourists to the desert."

"The Fayoum's wildlife unfortunately no longer includes the crocodile, which was sacred here in ancient times, but boasts swamp cats and mongooses, spoonbills and flamingos."

Page 9:

"Today, the 342,005 fedda (1,437 square kilometers) of cultivated land in the Fayoum support a wide variety of crops, changing according to the season, the area and the type of soil, the preferences of the individual farmer, and the quotas of the government. The main cash crop of the region is cotton, whose cultivation is carefully controlled by the government."

They also grow tomatoes, chamomile, absinth, mint, marigold, sunflowers, fenugreek and sesame (the most profitable) and a kind of clover for feeding animals in the winter. Signifcant also are dates and fruits of various sorts.

Page 18:

"In ancient mythology, the great lake of the Fayoum was identified with Nun, the primeval ocean, the origin of all life, while the high land around the capital, Shedet, was the primeval hill where life first came into existence."

"A legend recorded by Diodorus tells of King Menes (the semi-mythical uniter of Upper and Lower Egypt) on a hunting expedition in the Fayoum. His own dogs attacked him near the lake, but his life was saved by a crocodile, which carried him across the water to safety. In gratitude he declared the lake a sanctuary for crocodiles, and founded the city of Shedet (later Crocodopolis, now Kiman Faris), which became the cult center of the crocodile god Sobek."

"In early dynastic times, the Fayoum remained undeveloped, much of it probably marsh and swamp, but it was popular as a hunting-ground in royal circles..."

"It was probably the founder of the Twelfth Dynasty, Amenemhat I, who, in the first half of the twelfth century BCE, flooded the Fayoum to create the famous Lake Moeris, describe 1,500 years later by Herodotus."

Later the Greeks drained part of the lake and settled in number near it. The area went into decline as the Roman Empire became unstable. It was one of the last areas to fall to Arab armies in the 7th century, A.D., and hit its nadir under the Ottoman Turks during the period 1517-1798.

Page 26:

"Since the 1950s, land reclamation, the establishment of cooperatives, and the rural electrification program, among other things, have led some way toward a revival of the properity the Fayoum once knew under the Ptolemies [i.e., Greeks], though most of the land lost under the Romans remains desert still."