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Abstract The ceramics production in Egypt was not limited only to the use of the clayey sediments deposited from the waters of the Nile River on the banks of its valley and in the Nile delta. Certainly, the Nile silt deposits have been used from the Pharaonic epoch until the present day as a fundamental raw material for the manufacture of ceramics and pottery. Nevertheless, the areas located on Lake Mariout were also exploited, as its water covered vast areas on the northwest coast of Egypt in antiquity (During the Hellenstic and Roman epochs) (Figure 1). It has been reported that the Lake Mariout reached a significant extent in antiquity, whereby the end of the 1st century BC, its width was over 28 km NW-SE, and its length was about 55 km NE-SW, representing the length of its arm with the addition of the north shore of the basin (Strabo, 1997). The lake sustained an adequate water level through the various canals connecting its basin with the old Canopic branch derived from the Nile River, providing an efficient navigation as well, among the bounded areas. The Canopic branch supplying the lake’s water started to drain during the 5th century AD and took several centuries until it reached a state of aridity in the 13th century AD, even though it was still regularly supplied by the Nile water in a fluctuated supplying process delineated by the seasons (Pichot, 2017). In fact, the geographical settings of the Mareotic region made the Lake Mariout be at the convergence between the marine and deltaic environments, with a water supply feeding its basin from both the seawater infiltration and the Nile River water supply, under the influence of a desertic climate. |