The two places with which Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt’s work has been chiefly connected are the Fayyum and Behnesa, the site of the ancient Permje or Oxyr-rhynchus.  The lake-province of the Fayyum, which attained such prominence in the days of the XIIth Dynasty, seems to have had little or no history during the whole period of the New Empire, but in Ptolemaic times it revived and again became one of the richest and most important provinces of Egypt.  The town of Arsinoe was founded at Crocodilopolis, where are now the mounds of Kom el-Faris (The Mound of the Horseman), near Medinet el-Payyum, and became the capital of the province.  At Illahun, just outside the entrance to the Fayyum, was the great Nile harbour and entrepot of the lake-district, called Ptolemais Hormos.

The explorations of Messrs. Hogarth, Grenfell, and Hunt in the years of 1895-6 and 1898-9 resulted in the identification of the sites of the ancient cities of Karanis (Kom Ushim), Bacchias (Omm el-’Atl), Euhemeria (Kasr el-Banat), Theadelphia (Harit), and Philoteris (Wadfa).  The work for the University of California in 18991900 at Umm el-Baragat showed that this place was Tebtunis.  Dime, on the northern coast of the Birket Karun, the modern representative of the ancient Lake Moeris, is now known to be the ancient Sokno-paiou Nesos (the Isle of Soknopaios), a local form of Sebek, the crocodile-god of the Fayyum.  At Karanis this god was worshipped under the name of Petesuchos ("He whom Sebek has given"), in conjunction with Osiris Pnepheros (P-nefer-ho, “the beautiful of face"); at Tebtunis he became Seknebtunis., i.e.  Sebek-neb-Teb-tunis (Sebek, lord of Tebtunis).  This is a typical example of the portmanteau pronunciations of the latter-day Egyptians.

Many very interesting discoveries were made during the course of the excavations of these places (besides Mr. Hogarth’s find of the temple of Petesuchos and Pnepheros at Karanis), consisting of Roman pottery of varied form and Roman agricultural implements, including a perfect plough.* The main interest of all, however, lies, both here and at Behnesa, in the papyri.  They consist of Greek and Latin documents of all ages from the early Ptolemaic to the Christian.  In fact, Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt have been unearthing and sifting the contents of the waste-paper baskets of the ancient Ptolemaic and Roman Egyptians, which had been thrown out on to dust-heaps near the towns.  Nothing perishes in,, the dry climate and soil of Egypt, so the contents of the ancient dust-heaps have been preserved intact until our own day, and have been found by Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt, just as the contents of the houses of the ancient Indian rulers of Chinese Turkestan, at Niya and Khotan, with their store of Kha-roshthi documents, have been preserved intact in the dry Tibetan desert climate and have been found by Dr. Stein.** There is much analogy between the discoveries of Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt in Egypt and those of Dr. Stein in Turkestan.