Even a visit to the Fayyûm was doubtless a bold and unusual undertaking, and on this account Herodotos describes what he saw there at more than ordinary length, and extols the wonders of the district at the expense of the better-known monuments of Memphis and the Delta. But the Oasis had suffered much from the civil troubles which had afflicted Egypt. The dykes which kept out the inundation had been neglected, and the fertile nome was transformed into a stagnant lake. Herodotos saw it as the French _savans_ saw it at the beginning of the present century; the embankments were broken, and fields and roads were alike submerged.
From the walls of the capital of the province, whose mounds now lie outside Medînet el-Fayyûm, Herodotos looked northward over a vast expanse of water. “Nearly in the middle of it,” he tells us, “stand two pyramids, each of them rising 304 feet above the water ... and both surmounted by colossal stone figures seated upon a throne.” The shattered fragments of the colossi were found by Professor Petrie in 1888, scattered round the pyramidal pedestals, twenty-one feet high, on which they had been placed. Cut out of hard quartzite sandstone, they represented Amon-em-hat III., the creator of the Fayyûm, and their discoverer calculates that they were each thirty-five feet in height. The fragments are now at Oxford in the Ashmolean Museum. The statues faced northward, and the court within which they stood was surrounded by a wall with a gateway of red granite. The pedestals still remain fairly intact, and the road by the side of which they had been erected is still used to-day. The monuments, in fact, were erected high above the inundation, and that Herodotos should have seen them in the midst of the water is but a further proof of the condition of the country at the time. The Lake Mœris he describes was not the true Mœris of Egyptian geography; it was the Fayyûm itself buried beneath the flood.
The total height of the colossi from the ground, according to Professor Petrie, was about sixty feet. Between this and the 304 feet assigned to them by the Greek traveller there is indeed a wide difference. But Herodotos could not have seen them close at hand, and the measurement he gives must have been a mere guess. It warns us, however, not to put overmuch faith in his statements, even when they are the results of personal observation. He was but a tourist, not a man of science, and he cared more for the tales of his dragoman and novel sights than for scientific surveying and exactitude.