Before the days when the conquests of the eighteenth dynasty had created an Egyptian empire in Asia, and brought foreign supplies of food to Egypt, the rise of the Nile was a matter of vital interest. The very existence of the people depended upon it. Too high a Nile meant scarcity, too low a Nile famine. It was only when the river rose to its normal level and overflowed the fields at the stated time that the heart of the agriculturist was gladdened, and he knew that the gods had given him a year of plenty. The seven years’ famine of Joseph’s age is not the only seven years’ famine which Egypt has had to endure. El-Makrîzî, the Arabic historian of Egypt, describes one which lasted for seven years, from A.D. 1064 to 1071, and, like that of Joseph, was caused by a deficient Nile. A stela discovered by Mr. Wilbour on the island of Sehêl, in the middle of the First Cataract, and engraved in the time of the Ptolemies, similarly records a famine that was wasting the country because ‘the Nile-flood had not come for seven years.’[115] And it is possible that a memorial of the famine of Joseph has been discovered by Brugsch in one of the tombs of El-Kab. Here the dead man, a certain Baba, is made to say, ‘When a famine arose, lasting many years, I issued out corn to the city.’ Baba must have lived in the latter part of the Hyksos domination, so that the date of his inscription would agree with that of Joseph.[116] Whether the power of Joseph and his master would still have extended as far south as El-Kab in the age of Baba, we do not know. But we do know that a famine which prevailed in Lower Egypt in consequence of a low Nile would have equally prevailed in the Thebaid. It would not, however, have prevailed in Canaan. In Canaan the ground is watered, not by the Nile, but by the rains of heaven, and in Canaan, therefore, it was only a want of rain that could have caused a scarcity of food.