Browsing Wikipedia in early 2024, you might have stumbled upon an article about Lake Moeris and encountered this opening paragraph. Chances are if you had, you’d have kept browsing. (If it had been me, I’d have clicked on endorheic, to discover what that word means.)
Lake Moeris (Ancient Greek: Μοῖρις, genitive Μοίριδος) is an ancient artificially-fed endorheic lake in the northwest of the Faiyum Oasis, 80 km (50 mi) southwest of Cairo, Egypt. In prehistory, it was a freshwater lake, with an area estimated to vary between 1,270 km2 (490 sq mi) and 1,700 km2 (660 sq mi).
If you came across that article today, after a student in Christine Johnson’s History of Ancient Egypt class at Western Washington University worked on the article, you would see something a little different. (The Dashboard’s article highlighting tool depicted here shows us what the student wrote.)
Lake Moeris (Ancient Greek: Μοῖρις, genitive Μοίριδος) was an ancient endorheic freshwater lake located in the Faiyum Oasis, 80 km (50 mi) southwest of Cairo, Egypt, which persists today at a fraction of its former size as thehypersaline Lake Qarun (Arabic: بركة قارون).
If you’re anything like me, the phrase “persists today at a fraction of its former size” will catch your attention. What happened? And when?
Before the student expanded it, the Lake Moeris article was limited – a historical artifact, yet another snapshot of Ancient Egypt’s grandeur that could easily be lost amongst far grander accomplishments. The current article doesn’t just give readers a much more compelling history, it also lets them make inferences about the future.
The depth of history in the Nile Valley warrants the adjective “mind-boggling”. The scope of environmental change in the area is vast. Where else do you start an article by talking about the Messinian Salinity Crisis (a period 5.96 to 5.33 million years ago when the Mediterranean Sea dried up)?
During the Messinian Salinity Crisis of the late Miocene, the Nile flowed past the empty Faiyum basin at the bottom of a large canyon which reached some 2.4 kilometres (1.5 mi) deep where the city of Cairo now sits.[11] Although the mechanism of the Faiyum basin’s creation was subject to some scholarly debate among geologists in the early 20th century, the consensus view remains that the basin itself emerged primarily as a consequence of wind erosion.[2][12] After the Mediterranean re-flooded at the end of the Miocene, the Nile canyon becamea gulf of the sea which extended inland to the site of present-day Kom Ombo.[13] Over the course of geological time this inlet of the Mediterranean gradually filled with silt and became the Nile valley.
The article goes on to discuss human settlement from the Neolithic through the Egyptian Old and Middle Kingdoms into Ptolomeic and Roman times. How the Egyptians built a city there, reclaimed land around the lake, and constructed a channel connecting it to the Nile, turning it into a major agricultural site. Eventually, civil war during the Crisis of the Third Century saw the irrigation works collapse and the loss of a connection to the Nile. Lake Moeris shrank into Lake Qarun, a hypersaline lake that occupies just a corner of its former extent.
You can see these additions by the student editor, in addition to a section they added about the ecology and fisheries of the lake, using the article viewer on Wiki Education’s Dashboard. (If you’re reading this some time in the future, after the article has undergone additional development, you might need to click on the “show last edited version” at the bottom of the page to see the student’s work.)
The Ancient Egyptians lived in a time when the Sahara was becoming drier, and they went to great lengths to adapt to those environmental changes that happened over the course of centuries. Today we face similar challenges in a world that’s warming much more quickly. By telling a more complete story about the past, this student’s work gives readers context to think about our future.
Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.
