gun to fall. Then hope is swallowed up in despair. Only the lands
lying nearest to the river have been inundated; those at a greater
distance from it lie parched and arid during the entire summer-time, and
fail to produce a single blade of grass or spike of corn. Famine stares
the poorer classes in the face, and unless large supplies of grain have
been laid up in store previously, or can be readily imported from
abroad, the actual starvation of large numbers is the inevitable
consequence. We have heartrending accounts of such famines. In the year
457 of the Hegira (A.D. 1064) a famine began, which lasted seven years,
and was so severe that dogs and cats, and even human flesh, were eaten;
all the horses of the Caliph but three perished, and his family had to
fly into Syria. Another famine in A.D. 1199 is recorded by Abd-el-Latif,
an eye-witness, in very similar terms.

There is reason to believe that, under the twelfth dynasty, some
derangement of meteoric or atmospheric conditions passed over Abyssinia
and Upper Egypt, either in both the directions above noticed, or, at any
rate, in the latter and more ordinary one. An official belonging to the
later part of this period, in enumerating his merits upon his tomb,
tells us, "There was no poverty in my days, no starvation in my time,
even when there were years of famine. I ploughed all the fields of Mah
to its southern and northern boundaries; I gave life to its
inhabitants, making its food; no one was starved in it. I gave to the
widow as to the married woman." As the late Dr. Birch observes, "Egypt
was occasionally subject to famines; and these, at the time of the
twelfth dynasty, were so important, that they attracted great attention,
and were considered worthy of record by the princes or hereditary lords
who were buried at Beni-Hassan. Under the twelfth dynasty, also, the
tombs of Abydos show the creation of superintendents, or storekeepers of
the public granaries, a class of functionaries apparently created to
meet the contingency."[11]

The distress of his subjects under these circumstances seems to have
drawn the thoughts of "the good Amenemhat" to the devising of some
system which should effectually remedy these evils, by preventing their
occurrence. In all countries where the supply of water is liable to be
deficient, it is of the utmost importance to utilize to the full that
amount of the life-giving fluid, be it more or be it less, which the
bounty of nature fur