The Famine Stela Sehel Island Aswan

The Famine Stela is an inscription written in Egyptian hieroglyphs located on Sehel Island in the Nile near Aswan in Egypt, which tells of a seven-year period of drought and famine during the reign of pharaoh Djoser of the Third Dynasty.

The Famine Stela was inscribed into a natural granite block whose surface was cut into the rectangular shape of a stela. The inscription is written in hieroglyphs and contains 32 columns.

he top part of the stele depicts three Egyptian deities: Khnum, Satis and Anuket. In front of them, Djoser faces them, carrying offerings in his outstretched hands. A broad fissure, which already existed at the time of creating the stela, runs horizontally through the middle of the rock. Some sections of the stela are damaged, making a few passages of the text unreadable.

The text describes how the king is upset and worried as the land has been in the grip of a drought and famine for seven years, during which time the Nile has not flooded the farmlands. The text also describes how the Egyptians are suffering as a result of the drought and that they are desperate and breaking the laws of the land.

A stone stela is engraved on a rock at the island Sehel, near Elephantine, Egypt, north of Aswan. It was discovered in 1889 by C.E. Wilbour and was deciphered by various egyptologists: Brugsch (1891), Pleyte (1891), Morgan (1894), Sethe (1901), Barguet (1953) and Lichtheim (1973). This stela features three of the most renowned characters of the Egyptian civilization:

• Pharaoh Zoser, around 2,750 BC, built the first pyramid, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. This monument is claimed to illustrate the invention of building with stone.
• Imhotep, scribe and architect of Zoser’s pyramid, who has been honored and deified for having invented the building with stone.
• God Khnum, the potter who, as in the Bible, is fashioning the bodies of humans and gods with the Nile silt, with clay, in other words processing minerals. 

Called «The Famine Stele», it was engraved during a recent epoch, under the Ptolemees (200 BC), but certain reliable clues have led egyptologists to believe that, in an amplified form it had already become an authentic document by the beginning of the Old Kingdom (2,750 BC).