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Updated: May 20, 2025
The Legend sets forth that the Viceroy of Nubia, in the reign of Tcheser, was a nobleman called Meter, who was also the overseer of all the temple properties in the South.
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.
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.
Brugsch, who in the course of 1891 published a transcript of the text with a German translation and notes in a work entitled Die biblischen sieben Jahre der Hungersnoth, Leipzig, 8vo. 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.
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 Ist Dynasty, and had they done this, they would have made the authority of Khnemu over the Nile coaeval with Dynastic civilization.
He who failed in any way to comply with the enactments was to be beaten with the rope, and the name of Tcheser was to be perpetuated in the temple.
It is impossible to assume that no great famine took place in Egypt between the reign of Tcheser and the period when the inscription was made, and when we consider this fact the choice by the editor of the legend of a famine which took place under the IIIrd Dynasty to illustrate the power of Khnemu seems inexplicable. Arab historians also mention several famines which lasted for seven years.
The form of the Legend, and the shapes of the hieroglyphs, and the late spelling of the words, prove that the inscription is the work of the Ptolemaic Period, though it is possible that the Legend in its simplest form is as old as the period to which it is ascribed in the Sāhal text, namely, the third dynasty, about 4100 B.C. The subject of the Legend is a terrible famine, which lasted for seven years, in the reign of King Tcheser, and which recalls the seven years' famine that took place in Egypt when Joseph was there.
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