ABSTRACT
The Book of the Fayum is the modern name for a group of Greco-Roman period Egyptian texts providing a map or description of the Fayum district, a name that has become standard since Beinlich's publication of all the material then known. The primary form is likely to have been a hieroglyphic text written upon papyrus, with extensive illustrations; several copies survive, some extremely fragmentary. The irrigation system has been modified again and again, but its basic shape as a broad region of cultivation. Lanzone records that his own interest in the texts arose from his work on mythology. Even if the orthography of the texts bears some similarity to the difficult and idiosyncratic style of the Greco-Roman temple texts, these had been well studied and understood by the later 19th century. Towards the end, Herodotus turned to a fanciful narrative of the rise of the Egyptian Saite Dynasty.
