The more usual form of calamity is of the opposite kind.  Once or twice in a century the Abyssinian rainfall is deficient.  The rise of the Nile is deferred beyond the proper date.  Anxious eyes gaze daily on the sluggish stream, or consult the “Nilometers” which kings and princes have constructed along its course to measure the increase of the waters.  Hopes and fears alternate as good or bad news reaches the inhabitants of the lower valley from those who dwell higher up the stream.  Each little rise is expected to herald a greater one, and the agony of suspense is prolonged until the “hundred days,” traditionally assigned to the increase, have gone by, and there is no longer a doubt that the river has begun 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]