Rensselaer Union, Volume 3, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 August 1871 — Famines. [ARTICLE]

Famines.

The earliest famine of which we have any aciou t is that of Abraham after lie had pitched his tent on the cast of Ikthel, when “ Abram went down into Egypt, to sojourn there, for tho famine was grevious in the land.” We next hear of the famine in the dayfc of Joseph, when “all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn, because that the famine was sore in all lands.” The modern history of Egypt throws light on these ancient records, as well as on the present famine in Persia. A famine of great severity is recorded by Abd-el Latuf, who was an eye-witness, and a tiustworthy authority, It occurred in tile year 1200. He states that the people were driven to tho last extremities, eating oiFul, and even their own dead, and mentions, us an instance of the dire straits to which they were pushed, that persons who were burnt alive for eating human flesh, were themselves, thus ready roasted, eaten by other. Another yet more remarkable famine was that of the reign of Fatimee-Khaleefat-El-Mustansir Billah, which is tho only instance on record of one of seven years' duiation in Egypt since the times of Joseph. This famine exceeded in severity all of modern times. It occurred A. D. 1064-1071. Vehement drought and pestilence continued for seven consecutive years, so that the people ate corpses and the carcasses of animals that had died of themselves. Organized bands of kidnappers which infested Cairo caught passengers in the streets by ropes furnished with hooks and let down from thohouses. All the horses of the monarch perished save three, and even his women fled on foot, by way of Syria, to escape the common peril. In tho year 1270 the comparative price of wheat in England was 1,008 shillings per quarter, and Peckham, as quoted by Fleetwood, states that “provisions was so scarce that people did eat their own children.” In the year 1001, in France, in the reign of Robert the Pious, the son of Hugh Capet, there was a terrible famine. It is stati d that the distress for food was so great that the bodies of tho dead were no sooner committed to tho grave than they were torn up and devoured by the famished people. Travelers were murdered, and children decoyed from their parents and slain for food. A butcher of Toumay was condemned to be burned for exposing human flesh for sale in his shop. ' The celebrated type ot Death on the Pale Horse, occurring in the sixth chapter of Revelation, is applied by a very judicious and learned expositor to the famine and pestilence which prevailed in the Roman Empire during the reigns of Decius, Gallus and Valerian, from A. D. 250 to 265. This plague; says Gibbon, raged without interruption for fifteen’years in every province, every city, and almost every family in the Roman Empire. During some time five thousand persons died daily in Rome; and riiany towns were entirely depopulated. He calculates that one-half of the human race was destroyed. “At Alexandria an exact register was kept of all the citizens entitled to receive the distribution of corn. It was found that the ancienj number of those comprised between the ages of forty and seventy, had been equal to the whole sum of the claimants, from fourteen to four score years of age, who remained alive after the death of Gal Menus. Applying this authentic fact to the most correct tables of mortality, it evidently proves that about half of the people of Alexandria had perished, and flbuld we venture to extend the analogy to other provinces, we might suspect that war, pestilcnca, and famine had consumed in a few years the moiety of the human species.