Helping the nation by revealing the distress

Author's name: Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi

Then famine struck during the Ayyubid dynasty... and its cause was the Nile's cessation of flow and its falling below its usual level... so people from the villages to Cairo increased their numbers due to hunger. Spring came, and a wind blew, followed by plague and famine. Food became scarce until people ate their young children out of hunger. Fathers would eat their sons roasted and cooked, and women would eat their children... Then the situation worsened until the food of many people became the flesh of human beings, to the point that they became accustomed to it, and they were rarely forbidden from it due to the lack of food from all grains, other vegetables, and everything that the earth grows. An interesting and important book in which Al-Maqrizi, one of Egypt's most important historians, discusses the history of the famines that afflicted Egypt from ancient times until the beginning of the ninth century AH (fifteenth century AD), when this book was written. Then, in subsequent chapters, he analyzes, in a smooth, scientific manner, the causes of the famines and ways to treat them.