Great Nile Famine Begins in Fatimid Egypt

1064

The Nile failed to rise. For the first of seven consecutive years, the annual inundation that fed Egypt's fields fell catastrophically short, and the granaries of the Delta began to empty. Grain prices in Cairo would eventually reach thirty dinars per ardabb - thirty times the normal rate. What followed was one of the medieval world's worst humanitarian catastrophes: starvation so extreme that chroniclers recorded the living eating the dead.