When the Nile Failed to Rise

In his book Modern Discovery and the Bible, A. Rendle Short reports: “Famines in Egypt rarely last long. As everybody knows, agriculture in that country entirely depends on the Nile inundation. A very interesting discovery has been made, on the island of Elephantine, of a tablet to commemorate the fact that for seven successive years the Nile failed to rise. The exact date of this tablet cannot be ascertained, but an inscription has been discovered and published by Brugsch, as far as we can tell coinciding with the time of Joseph.”