A Physician on the Nile by ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī

Author:ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press

2.1.29 Upon my life, these phenomena are potent indicators indeed; but they are general to all climes, and not peculiar to Egypt alone. That said, this very same set of events has also taken place in this present year: stars scattering all over at the start of the year, water levels falling at the end of it, and the ruler of Egypt being replaced during it by his uncle, al-Malik al-ʿĀdil, following a war between the two of them.220

CHAPTER TWO: THE EVENTS OF THE YEAR 597 [1200–1]

2.2.1 And then came the year ‘seven—that monstrous year, that predatory date, “seven,” the severer of lives.221 People had already abandoned hope of the Nile rising. Prices went up, and the land was stricken with drought. The populace sensed the coming calamity, and fear of famine made them riotous. The villagers and country folk took refuge in the main towns. Many emigrated to the Levant, the Maghrib, the Hijaz, and Yemen: “they dispersed through the lands like the people of Sabā” and were torn apart «and scattered in every direction».222 A vast throng of these creatures also made their way into Cairo and Old Fustat; but their hunger only grew more severe, and they began to die off. Then, when the sun entered Aries,223 the air became pestilential, and diseases and deadly contagions struck.

2.2.2 The paupers became so famished that they ate carrion, however rotten, as well as dogs, and the droppings and dung of animals.224 Then they went beyond that—so far beyond as to eat human children. Often, they would be discovered in possession of young children, roasted or stewed; the chief of police would give orders for the perpetrator and anyone else who had eaten the victim to be executed by burning. I myself saw a basket containing a roasted child, which had been brought to the prefect’s residence along with a man and a woman people claimed were the child’s parents; the prefect ordered them to be burned.225 During Ramadan [ June–July 1201], the discovery was made in Old Fustat of a man whose flesh had been stripped off his bones and eaten, leaving the victim in the form of a “lattice”—just as chefs do with sheep.226 Nothing like this was ever available for Galen to examine, and he tried every trick to get hold of such a skeleton—as, indeed, has every avid student of anatomy.227

2.2.3 At first, when the paupers fell into the habit of eating human flesh, people would exchange all the news and gossip about their doings, simultaneously shocked by the whole business and excited by so bizarre a development.228 But the paupers’ flesh-lust intensified, and they became increasingly addicted to cannibalism: they made it a way of life, a source of enjoyment, and a means of sustenance, and became ever more inventive in its practice. Moreover, the habit spread beyond them, until it could be encountered in every corner of Egypt. At this point, people ceased to be excited or appalled by it; to tell or listen to stories about it was now deemed to be in the worst taste.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.