Readers of RockArtBlog will remember that I include inscriptions on stone as a part of our field of interest. I cannot personally find the dividing line between petroglyphs or pictographs and various forms of writing (which can be pictograms such as Egyptian hieroglyphs). I have recently run across a form of inscription carved in stone that I had been previously unaware of - the “Hunger Stone.” Art historians, and historians in general, will have heard of nilometers, the various inscriptions carved into rock that allowed Egyptians to judge the height of the Nile flood phase each year. These have been used for thousands of years. Hunger Stones (hungersteins) are sort of the opposite of this. The nilometer measures the height of the water in the Nile, a hunger stone indicates that the water level is dangerously low. When the river flow is low enough that the inscription is exposed the inhabitants are, in effect, warned that famine may occur because of water shortage, lack of moisture and crop failure.
Hunger stones are “a type of hydrological landmark common in Central Europe. Hunger stones serve as famine memorials and warnings and were erected in Germany and in ethnic German settlements throughout Europe in the 15th through 19th centuries. These stones were embedded into a river during droughts to mark the water level as a warning to future generations that they will have to endure famine-related hardships if the water sinks to this level again. One famous example in the Elbe river in Děčín, Czech Republic, has ‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’ (lit. ‘If you see me, weep’) carved into it as a warning.
Many of these stones, featuring carvings or other artwork, were erected following the hunger crisis of 1816-1817 caused by the eruptions of the Tambora volcano. In 1918, a hunger stone on the bed of the Elbe River near Tetschen, became exposed during a period of low water coincident to the wartime famines of World War I. Similar hunger stones in the river were uncovered again during a drought in 2018.” (Wikipedia
The “If You See Me, Weep” warning had been carved in German by boatman and riverside innkeeper Franz Mayer during a period of low water in 1904 while the country was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Marchal 2018) Others have considerably less carving bearing only dates marking the low water levels for that specific year.
Boatmen and rafters had earned their livelihoods by ferrying goods and passengers back and forth over the river, and when the river water was too low their business and income collapsed. “The rafters engraved the dates of those bad years on the soft sandstone boulders typical for this region, hence the name ‘Hunger Stone.’ About 20 such boulders, engraved with markers and dates going back centuries, can still be found on the banks of the Elbe, a major central European waterway running from the Czech Republic through Germany to the North Sea.” (Marchal 2018)
The 2018 exposure of that stone was caused by drought that “affected around 94 percent of the Czech Republic, causing crop damage estimated at nine to 11 billion koruna (350-427 million euros, $408-500 million), according to the Agrarian Chamber.” (Marchal 2018) It would seem that, in spite of modern dams and water control features, the message of the hunger stones is still relevant to modern times, and in the age of global warning, may become ever more pertinent.
NOTE: Some images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.
REFERENCES:
Hunger Stone, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_stone
Marchal, Jan, 2018 ‘Hunger Stones’ Tell Elbe’s Centuries-Old Tale of Drought, September 10, 2018, https://phys.org/news/2018-09-hunger-stones-elbe-centuries-old-tale.html
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