“The Fayyum is in the power of Sobek.“
“The Book of the Fayyum” is a text that was produced during the Roman Period, and presents Sobek, the Fayyum Oasis, and its central Lake Moeris of great mythical importance.
The Fayyum Oasis sits in the desert west of the Nile, 60 miles south of Cairo. It’s main city Fayyum was known as Shedet to the Egyptians, and Crocodilopolis to the Greeks. Sobek was the patron god of the Oasis, having claimed it as his own, and Shedet was his cult center.
The “Book of the Fayyum” seems to have been highly popular in Roman Egypt, as many copies and partial copies of it have been discovered, as well as in hieroglyphs in the Temple of Kom Ombo.
The below is a brief summary, and I suggest “Egypt’s Mysterious Book of the Faiyum” by Horst Beinlich for a much more in-depth reading.
The text situates the Fayyum Oasis as belonging to Sobek, and calls the oasis “the temple of Sobek of Shedet and Horus of Shedet”. (1) Lake Moeris itself is Sobek’s temple, of which he has taken ownership.
Here, Sobek is the Creator, who “was created from himself, who emerged from the Wadj-wer (the Great Green)”. Sobek has the power to regenerate and create life from himself. Wadj-wer is a substantial body of water with extensive greenery along its shorelines, and Sobek is “Lord of the Marshes”.
The journey of the Sun begins when he is born in the East out of the lake, and in the morning the crocodile-headed sun god sends its light to the crocodile mummy, who is mourned by Isis and Nephthys as they do Osiris.
In the evening, the Sun sets on the Western side of the Lake, the land of the dead. At the moment of sunset, the sun becomes Amun-Ra, a ram sphinx with the tail of a crocodile. Instead of the nightly journey found elsewhere in Egypt of the Sun traveling through the caves of the Underworld, here in the Fayyum the Sun as a crocodile swims through the watery Underworld of the Lake to rise again triumphant.
When the Sun God is reborn in the East, he is attacked by his enemies on the “Island of the Flame”, a mythical, and mystical, place on the horizon. The enemies are massacred daily, of course, and the red horizon of sunrise is caused by either their blood or the aforementioned flame.
The Lake as “Temple of Sobek” is emphasized by a cartouche, magically protective, around the hieroglyph for ‘temple’, and within it is written “Temple of Sobek of Shedet”. The real names of the gods are hidden, and to discover it is to give one power over the god, and they are protected by cartouches. In this, the Lake itself is a huge name ring protecting Sobek’s true name. (1)
(1) Beinlich, Horst. Egypt’s Mysterious Book of the Faiyum. 2013
Dua Sobek 