The prosperity of Egypt depends upon the Nile. If the river rises to too great a height during the period of inundation, the autumn crops are damaged or destroyed. If, on the other hand, its rise is insufficient to fill the canals and basins, or to reach the higher ground, the land remains unwatered, and nothing will grow. Egypt, in fact, is the gift of the Nile; let the channel of the great river be diverted elsewhere, and the whole country would at once become an uninhabited desert. A low Nile consequently brings with it a scarcity of food. When provisions cannot be imported from abroad, famine is the necessary result, and the population perishes in thousands. Such was the case in the eleventh and twelfth centuries of our era, when the inundation was deficient for several successive years. The Arabic writers, El-Makrîzî and Abd-el-Latîf, describe the famines that ensued in terrible terms. Abd-el-Latîf was a witness of that which lasted from A.D. 1200 to 1202, and of the horrors which it caused. After eating grass, corpses, and even excrement, the wretched inhabitants of the country began to devour one another. Mothers were arrested in the act of cooking their own children, and it was unsafe to walk in the streets for fear of being murdered for food. The famine described by El-Makrîzî lasted, like that of Joseph, for seven years, from A.D. 1064 to 1071, and was similarly occasioned by a deficient Nile. A hieroglyphic inscription, discovered in 1888 by Mr. Wilbour in the island of Sehêl, contains a notice of another famine of seven years, which occurred at an earlier date. The island of Sehêl lies in the Cataract, midway between Assouan and Philæ, and the inscription is carved on a block of granite and looks towards the south. It is dated in the eighteenth year of a king, who was probably one of the Ethiopian princes that reigned over southern Egypt in the troublous age of the fourth and fifth Ptolemies. According to Dr. Brugsch’s translation, it states that the king sent to the governor of Nubia saying: “I am sorrowing upon my high throne over those who belong to the palace. In sorrow is my heart for the vast misfortune, because the Nile flood in my time has not come for seven years. Light is the grain; there is lack of crops and of all kinds of food. Each man has become a thief to his neighbour. They desire to hasten and cannot walk; the child cries, the youth creeps along and the old man; their souls are bowed down. Their legs are bent together and drag along the ground, and their hands rest in their bosoms. The counsel of the great ones of the court is but emptiness. Torn open are the chests of provisions, but instead of contents there is air. Everything is exhausted.” The text then goes on to declare how Khnum the Creator came to the help of the Pharaoh, and caused the Nile once more to inundate the lands. In return for this the king gave the priests of Khnum at Elephantinê twenty miles of river bank on either side of the island,