3-034-810 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Famine in Persia: starving people at Shiraz, 1871. 'At Ispahan...dead bodies lie unburied in the houses and on the roads for want of strength to inter them. Bread was at three times its usual price...In some districts, it was reckoned, a third of the Mohammedan population had died, and two thirds of the cattle and beasts of burden...Kazeeron, which recently contained 11,000 or 12,000 inhabitants, had dwindled to a total of some 600 to 700 poor people. The Hungarian traveller, Mr. Arminius Vambéry, explains the causes of this dreadful famine. "Agriculture in Persia," he says, "is in a very primitive state: the want of water is so great that the fields have to be irrigated by subterranean canals...and the peasant seldom cultivates more than what is required for his household, as the people live on nothing but vegetables for four months in the year. There is, consequently, never any considerable superfluity of corn, and the results of a bad harvest are terrible...men have died of hunger in the public streets...now we hear that the distress in Eastern Khorassan, which has always been behind the other parts of the country in culture and social prosperity, is far greater.' From "Illustrated London News", 1871.