Egypt's Cannibal Year

     Famine! You don't hear about it any more in industrial societies, but in pre-industrial periods its grim spectre was always lurking in the background. Thus, May is a balmy month in Europe, but in the middle ages it was also often the hungry month for poor peasants, as the harvest of the previous year ran out before the new one was available. Thus, it required only a poor harvest, a hard winter, or the depredations of an army for those living on the edge to be pushed over. In really bad years, most of the population would be affected, and mass starvation ensured. Ironically, at such times a plentiful supply of meat was available, but a heavy taboo lay upon it: the bodies of the dead. Initially, no doubt, the taboo was broken when starving individuals sliced off a steak from the body of someone who had already succumbed to starvation. Since no-one was actually harmed, it is difficult to hold it blameworthy. However, later the temptation would arise to deliberately hasten the death. But what happened in Egypt in 1201 was truly horrible.
     Typically, the season of the harvest was between April and June. In mid-June the Nile flood begins, reaching its peak in September. In AD 1200 the Nile failed, with the result that the whole land, from what is now the northern Sudan up to Alexandria, faced a catastrophe of monumental proportions.
     But, unlike famines in other lands and at other times, this one had as an eye-witness one of the the medieval Arab world's great doctors, philosophers, and polymaths: ‘Abdu'l-Laṭîf al-Baghdâdî (1162-1231). An inveterate traveller, he was living in Cairo during the disaster, and shortly after his departure began writing an account of Egypt, a chapter of which was devoted to a sober, detailed description of the famine.

     At Misr, at Cairo, and in the surrounding areas, wherever a man directed his steps, there was nowhere that his feet did not encounter a corpse or someone in the last stages of agony, or even a great number of people in this unhappy state. Particularly in Cairo, they picked up from a hundred to five hundred dead bodies every day, to take them to the place where they were accorded burial rites. At Misr, the number of dead was incalculable; people there did not bury them, but contented themselves with throwing them outside the town. In the end, there were no longer enough people to collect them and they remained where they were, among the houses and shops, and even inside the living quarters. You would see a corpse fallen to pieces - and quite near a cook-shop, or a baker's, or other places of that kind.

     Many of the outlying villages were completely empty, the whole population having either fled on died. Travellers would find corpses, fresh or decomposing, in the houses, often with valuable possessions available to anybody intrepid enough to take them. The villagers fled to the major towns, and from there, as often as not, sought to migrate to Syria, Morocco, or Arabia, the road to Syria described as being like a field sown with dead bodies. A fisherman saw four hundred bodies float past in a single day. By April, pestilence was added to starvation. The poor were eating carrion, dogs, and excrement - all of it unclean to Muslims.
     A man whom he knew to be scrupulously truthful told him of passing a forsaken spot, where he saw a woman eating flesh from the thighs of a bloated corpse, which she told him belonged to her husband. One might give her the benefit of the doubt and assume he had died naturally. It became common to hear of people consuming the flesh of someone claimed to have been their close relative, even their own child, and it was better that they ate it than somebody else did. But it was only a short additional step to outright murder.

They went further, and reached the stage of eating little children. It was not unusual to find people [selling] little children, roasted or boiled. The commandant of the city guard ordered that those who committed this crime should be burned alive, as should those who ate such meats.

      Al-Baghdadi himself saw a roast child in a basket. The culprits were the child's own parents, who were, on the commandant's orders, condemned to the flames. But the irony was that, just as pickpockets used to pick the pockets of the crowds watching the public hanging of pickpockets, so the bodies of criminals executed in this fashion seldom lasted till morning before being dismembered and eaten. It was, after all, cooked meat.
     One day al-Baghdadi complemented a woman on her chubby newborn baby. She then told him a sturdy ruffian had attempted to snatch him from her. She threw herself down to cover the baby with her body, but the villain sought to get a grip on any limb which might be protruding. The tug-a-war ceased only when a passing horseman drove off the attacker. Many other people narrated similar experiences to him.
     He said that, in the early days of cannibalism, people discussed it with horror, only to become accustomed to it as frequency brought indifference. He once saw a woman with a head wound being dragged through the market by some labourers, who had come upon her eating a small roast child, and what shocked the author more than the crime itself was that the rest of the people in the market were not shocked.
     Eventually, certain elements began to accept human flesh as their normal provender. The children of the poor, with no-one to care for or protect them, were scattered throughout the towns, where groups of both men and women lay in wait to hunt them. Al-Baghdadi saw a woman taken to the commandant with a roast child hung around her neck. Given two hundred lashes to make her talk, she nevertheless kept her silence, until someone pulled her roughly, and she expired on the spot. He reported that, in Misr, over a period of just a few days, thirty women were burned for cannibalism, and all of them admitted that they had eaten several children before being caught.
    Many of the poor took refuge on the island of Raudha, there to kidnap and eat passers-by. On raiding the place, the authorities discovered four hundred skulls.
     Some of the rich, who could still afford food, nevertheless took to cannibalism and found it to their liking. Al-Baghdadi heard a second hand report of a man invited to dinner, but who became suspicious when he noticed that the large meat fricassee was unaccompanied by any bread. On going out to relieve himself, he discovered a storehouse of human bones and fresh meat.
     Two of the author's doctor friends were lured into the back streets on the pretext of business, and only narrowly escaped becoming  dinner. Another was not so lucky; he never came back. A midwife rushed up to the commandant in such a frantic state she had left herself unveiled, and described going to a customer's place where, being suspicious of the meat being served, she  asked a little girl about its origin. The child innocently explained that it was Miss So-and-so, who had paid them a visit, and was then slaughtered and hung up by the girl's father. The midwife entered the storeroom and found it stocked with human meat.
    The author also mentioned a grocer found with jars of pickled human flesh, which he had preserved for the time when the famine intensified and future victims would be too skinny to eat. He also records two or three children found in a single cooking pot, a pot with ten hands prepared like sheep's trotters, a cauldron with the head and limbs of an adult simmering, and so forth.
    Bear in mind that this was all recorded by a man of letters who was in the centre of it. According to his own statement, he made no effort to seek out the scenes of horror he described, but so common were they that chance alone was sufficient to bring them to his attention. What he didn't see for himself he obviously heard from first hand witnesses.
    One wonders what was the effect on the population once the famine was over and new crop was in. I suspect that millions of people were psychologically traumatized, and none more so than those with a guilty conscience.
    Probably surreptitious cannibalism has occurred sporadically whenever widespread famine has taken place. But what happened in Egypt in 1201 was something exceptional: the wholesale breakdown of law and order and community cohesion. This does not appear to have been the case during more recent episodes of mass starvation - even in places such as Ethiopia, where the maintenance of law and order is likely to have been weak. Just the same, one wonders what really happened in other times, and in other places, where there was no educated witness to record it.

Reference: ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, Book of the Report and Account of the Things which I Witnessed and the Events Seen in the Land of Egypt. This manuscript, which is in the Bodleian Library, was translated into French by Silvestre de Stacy in 1810, but has never been translated into English. Nevertheless, the chapter on Egyptian cannibalism was translated by Reay Tannahill in chapter two of Flesh and Blood, a history of the cannibal complex (1975, Stein and Day, NY), from which I have taken this account.