Hunger Stones and Long Time

How can a deeper view of time save us from disaster?

By Morburre — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4392456 | The Famine Stela is an inscription written in Egyptian hieroglyphs located on Sehel Island in the Nile near Aswan in Egypt, which tells of a seven-year period of drought and famine during the reign of pharaoh Djoser of the Third Dynasty.

What fascinates us about things that are hidden? What entices us about the edge between the known and the unknown? Throughout history, human beings take note of patterns that emerge in the world around us, and even more note of those instances where breaks in a pattern form. We seek out abnormalities, edges, oddities. And we pass information on to our inheritors, marking our presence in a strange and mythic place, laying claim to the abnormalities of our time.

When droughts occur, rivers shrink, and thinks that were hidden reveal themselves. Strange shapes loom up from the depths and breach the air for the first time in decades or centuries. Rocks, old buildings, petrified trees. These relics of an underworld state remind us of hard times that came before, remind us that famine and hardship are upon us… but so, too, that famine and hardship will go away again.

Over the centuries, we mark these protruding markers as they arise, taking part in the collective task of charting our history. It seems that we do this both for our children’s children, so they might be forewarned of hardships to come, and also for ourselves, as reminders that we survived these times in the past, and we may survive them again. These markers have become known as “hunger stones,” reminders that, when last the water levels came so low, famine followed. This “phenomenon of drought has become the most prominent manifestation of climate change in central Europe,” as visible through a historical exploration of the Hunger Stones spread throughout European rivers (Elleder et al., 2020, p. 1822).

Dr. Bernd Gross — Own work Original text: Eigenes Foto

For centuries or more, we’ve marked the approach of famine for our children’s children’s sake. We clearly, as a species, care deeply for the survival of those who come after us. We have an instinct toward responsibility of some sort, if only as part of a mythic undertaking that gives form to something larger than ourselves. And yet, we fail to do the same for modern trials: the great famines to come will overshadow those of centuries past. For some parts of the world, this terror has already…