Famine: A Short History

By Cormac Ó Gráda

(Princeton University Press, 327 pp., $27.95)

The earliest recorded famines, according to Cormac Ó Gráda in his brief but masterful book, are mentioned on Egyptian stelae from the third millennium B.C.E. In that time--and to an extent, even today, above the Aswan dam in Sudan--farmers along the Nile were dependent on the river flooding to irrigate their fields. But one flood out of five, Ó Gráda tells us, was either too high or too low. The result was often starvation. The stelae commemorate the philanthropy of the aristocracy in providing food to the hungry. Other records of famine in the ancient world can be found in texts as various as Gilgamesh, the Joseph narrative in Genesis, Nehemiah, Cicero, and the Book of Revelation, in which the figure of famine is the third of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. 

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