The legend contained in this remarkable text describes a terrible
famine which took place in the reign of Tcheser, a king of the IIIrd
Dynasty, and lasted for seven years. Insufficient Nile-floods were, of
course, the physical cause of the famine, but the legend shows that the
"low Niles" were brought about by the neglect of the Egyptians in
respect of the worship of the god of the First Cataract, the great god
Khnemu. When, according to the legend, king Tcheser had been made to
believe that the famine took place because men had ceased to worship
Khnemu in a manner appropriate to his greatness, and when he had taken
steps to remove the ground of complaint, the Nile rose to its
accustomed height, the crops became abundant once more, and all misery
caused by scarcity of provisions ceased. In other words, when Tcheser
restored the offerings of Khnemu, and re-endowed his sanctuary and his
priesthood, the god allowed Hapi to pour forth his streams from the
caverns in the Cataract, and to flood the land with abundance. The
general character of the legend, as we have it here, makes it quite
certain that it belongs to a late period, and the forms of the
hieroglyphics and the spellings of the words indicate that the text was
"stunned" on the rock in the reign of one of the Ptolemies, probably at
a time when it was to the interest of some men to restore the worship
of Khnemu, god of the First Cataract. These interested people could
only have been the priests of Khnemu, and the probability that this was
so becomes almost a certainty when we read in the latter part of the
text the list of the tolls and taxes which they were empowered to levy
on the merchants, farmers, miners, etc., whose goods passed down the
Cataract into Egypt. Why, if this be the case, they should have chosen
to connect the famine with the reign of Tcheser is not clear. They may
have wished to prove the great antiquity of the worship of Khnemu, but
it would have been quite easy to select the name of some king of the