•It is an inscription written in Egyptian hieroglyphs on a 2.5 m high and 3 m wide block of granite located on Sehel Island near Aswan, Egypt.
•The stela tells the story of seven years of drought and famine during the reign of Pharaoh Djoser of the Third Dynasty. (ca. 2686 BC–ca. 2613 BC).
•It is thought that the stele was inscribed during the Ptolemaic Kingdom by King Ptolemy V (205 – 180 BC).
•The top part of the stele depicts three Egyptian deities and in front of them Djoser carries offerings in his outstretched hands.
The text describes how the king is upset and worried as the land has been in the grip of a drought and famine for seven years and how the Egyptians are suffering as a result of the drought and that they are desperate and breaking the laws of the land.•At the time of the first translation of the stela, it was thought that the story of a seven-year famine was connected to the biblical story in Genesis 41.
•More recent investigations have shown that a seven-year famine was a common thing to nearly all cultures of the Near East: a Mesopotamian legend also speaks of a seven-year-famine and in the well-known Gilgamesh-Epos the god Anu gives a prophecy about famine for seven years.
•Another Egyptian tale talks about a long-lasting drought that appears in the so-called “Book of the Temple”.
