FEARFUL FAMINES OF THE PAST 



79 



longed into seven. Prices soared to 

 heights probably never before reached in 

 the Near East. 



A single cake of bread sold for 15 

 dinars (the value of a dinar is slightly 

 more than $2.50), five bushels of grain 

 sold for 100 dinars, and eggs were scarce 

 at a dinar each. 



Cats and dogs brought fabulous prices, 

 and women, unable to purchase food with 

 their pearls and emeralds, flung the use- 

 less jewels into the streets. One woman, 

 according to a historian of the time, gave 

 a necklace worth 1,000 dinars for a mere 

 handful of flour. The caliph's stable, 

 which had numbered 10,000 horses and 

 mules, was reduced to three scrawny 

 "nags." 



HUMAN FLESH SOLD IN OPEN MARKET 



Rich and poor suffered on equal terms. 

 Finally the desperate people resorted- to 

 revolting cannibalism. Human flesh, 

 which was sold in the open market, was 

 obtained in the most horrible manner. 

 Butchers concealed themselves behind lat- 

 ticed windows in the upper stories of 

 houses which looked out upon busy thor- 

 oughfares. Letting down ropes to which 

 were attached great meat hooks, these 

 anglers for human flesh snared the un- 

 wary pedestrians, drew their shrieking 

 victims through the air, and then pre- 

 pared and cooked the food before pre- 

 senting it for sale in the stalls on the 

 street level. 



This seven years' reversion to savagery 

 induced by starvation had its companion 

 period of suffering and degradation in 

 the same country during the years 1201 

 and 1202. A gruesome picture of the 

 harrowing events has been preserved in 

 the writings of Abd-el-Latif, a learned 

 Bagdad physician who lived in Cairo dur- 

 ing the days which he describes in such 

 horror-awakening detail. 



Whole quarters and villages became 

 deserted during the famine which fol- 

 lowed the low Nile of 1200 and 1201, ac- 

 cording to this chronicler, who maintains 

 that the starving populace ate human flesh 

 habitually. True, the punishment meted 

 out to those detected in the crime was 

 death at the stake, but few criminals were 

 caught, and the custom could be practiced 



with impunity by parents who subsisted 

 on their own children. Men waylaid 

 women in the streets and snatched babies 

 from their mothers' arms, and the literal 

 physician recites at length the various 

 dishes into which the murderous kidnap- 

 pers converted their infant forage. 



The very graves of Egypt were ran- 

 sacked for food. The roads became 

 death traps, while flocks of vultures and 

 packs of hyenas and jackals mapped the 

 march of the cannibal outlaws. Of course, 

 the piles of unburied dead bred pestilence 

 of a virulent type. 



It is recorded that in a single month 

 one piece of property in Cairo passed to 

 forty heirs in rapid succession, so sweep- 

 ing was the mortality. 



In this famine man seems to have 

 plunged to the utmost depths of degrada- 

 tion and suffering. 



Vastly different were the scenes which 

 accompanied the severe Egyptian famine 

 of 1264, chiefly because there had arrived 

 in the country a man of rare administra- 

 tive ability — Bibars, a native of Kipchak, 

 between the Ural Mountains and the Cas- 

 pian. It is well to study Bibars, for, com- 

 ing shortly after the two anthropopha- 

 gous debauches of the Egyptians, his con- 

 duct of affairs demonstrates what a firm 

 hand might have been able to accomplish 

 in the preceding emergencies. 



A tall, robust figure, Bibars won from 

 a historian of that period the tribute that 

 "as a soldier he was not inferior to Julius 

 Cassar, nor in malignity to Nero." Yet 

 he was a sober, energetic, and resource- 

 ful executive, just to his own people and 

 lenient toward his Christian subjects. 



This former slave, who brought only 

 £20 when sold at auction, because of a 

 cataract on one of his eyes, was the real 

 founder of the Mameluke Empire. He 

 met the famine situation promptly and 

 vigorously, regulating the sale of corn 

 wisely, and compelling his officers and 

 emirs to support the destitute for three 

 months. 



Nor did he stop with these measures. 

 With astonishing forethought, consider- 

 ing the age in which he lived and the 

 people over whom he ruled, he attempted 

 by scientific isolation to eradicate con- 

 tagious diseases. Brothels and taverns 



