This Element is about the creation and curation of social memory in pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt.Ancient, Classical, Medieval, and Ottoman sources attest to the horror that characterized catastrophic famines.Occurring infrequently and rarely reaching the canonical seven-years' length, famines appeared and disappeared like nightmares.Communities that remain aware of potentially recurring tragedies are often advantaged in their efforts to avert or ameliorate worst-case scenarios.For this and other reasons, pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egyptians preserved intergenerational memories of hunger and suffering.This Element begins with a consideration of the trajectories typical of severe Nilotic famines and the concept of social memory.It then argues that personal reflection and literature, prophecy, and an annual festival of remembrance functioned-at different times, and with varying degrees of success-to convince the well-fed that famines had the power to unseat established order and to render a comfortably familiar world unrecognizable.