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Photo: Roland Unger, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
An agricultural town in the Ptolemaic Kingdom, inhabited until the early 5th century. The dry conditions here are most suitable for the preservation of papyri, which makes Karanis very well known by archaeologists. The papyri collected here are now part of the University of Michigan Papyrus Collection.
Karanis, located in what is now Kom Aushim, was an agricultural town in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt located in the northeast corner of the Faiyum Oasis. It was roughly 60 hectares in size and its peak population is estimated to be 4000 people, although it could have been as much as three times greater.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
Forgotten in the countryside more than 30 km northeast of Fayum, Meidum, a step pyramid, is one of the earliest pyramids ever built by the ancient Egyptians. The best way to get to this decidedly hard-to-reach site is perhaps to arrange a taxi in Fayum, or to look for the tours out of Cairo that combine a visit to Meidum with other off-the-beaten-path pyramid fields at Dahshur and Saqqara. No matter how you get there, you can be pretty sure that you will almost have all the site to yourself (along with few other lucky ones, at most).