Although the findings at Nabta Playa were worthy of international attention and respect, this sort of media sensationalism was misleading and confused the public. The impression given in the media prompted by the press release and the Nature letter was of a giant Stonehenge in the Sahara. When people eventually found out that the stones were much smaller and that they formed a rough circle only a few meters in diameter, there was general disappointment, and many people eventually lost interest. Furthermore, the letter in Nature contained some errors that were uncharacteristic for such a high-profile journal, as well as some significant omissions that would later make matters worse. All in all, the comparison to Stonehenge was a crude metaphor and amounted to a stillbirth for an otherwise very important discovery. In fact, it may have directly contributed to if not explained why the Egyptian authorities paid little heed to this important ancient artifact, why it was so mistreated and blantantly neglected by those who worked there, and why it was ultimately dismantled and taken away to a museum yard in Aswan (see appendix 3).
At any rate, most of the excitement on April 2, 1998, centered on the announcement of the discovery of a stone circle that was made with small stones that were each about 1 meter in height and that were placed in a ring 4 meters (about 13 feet) across. It was labeled the Calendar Circle by Fred Wendorf and his team. In reality, Wendorf and his team had known of the existence of this circle from the time they found the site of Nabta Playa in 1973, but nothing much was done about it until 1992, when the circle was reconstructed to its original form by Dr. Nieves Zedeño, an anthropologist from the University of Arizona, and her colleague Dr. Alex Applegate, who had recently joined the CPE.16 Yet it took a further six years before the world was told about it. Oddly, it was the Applegate-Zedeño reconstruction map of the Calendar Circle that was used by Wendorf and Malville and the rest of the authors in the 1998 Nature letter. Also, even more oddly, in this letter, the authors give an interpretation of only four stones in the circle and totally ignore the possible meanings of the other stones, especially those within the circle itself. Nevertheless, this limited information was enough to spur the “older than Stonehenge” claim and to ensure a massive media reaction.
Still, why did it take twenty-five years to inform the public of the oldest astronomical site in the world? What really happened to the stone circle between 1973 and 1998? First, we must emphasize that the Combined Prehistoric Expedition (CPE) was composed essentially of field anthropologists, archaeologists, and geologists, most of whom were unfamiliar with astronomy or, perhaps, simply reluctant to apply this science to their own professions. Thus, it took them from 1973 to 1992 to realize that the stone circle might be some sort of calendrical device. After the circle was reconstructed by Applegate and Zedeño in 1992, it quickly became apparent that an important feature of the circle were the so-called gates that created two alignments pointing to the rising sun at the summer solstice and also to the north-south meridian (which are both indicative of observation of the sun at important times of the year). At this stage, CPE director Fred Wendorf invited the American archaeoastronomer Kim Malville to come to Nabta Playa for the 1997 winter excavation season. Malville spent a few days at Nabta Playa in order to study the alignments of the stone circle and other features of the ceremonial complex, which resulted in the publication of the 1998 letter in Nature. In view of the importance of the claims made in Nature and the strong reputation and influence of Nature, we must now review in some detail what was reported in the letter.
GATES OF THE SUN
In the Nature letter, Malville and the other authors highlighted two sets of gates in the outer ring of stones of the Calendar Circle and deduced that these were deliberately intended to designate important directions: one set was directed north-south, clearly a cardinal direction; the other was directed northeast, clearly a summer solstice sunrise direction. In additon, according to Malville and the other authors, “The circle is too small to have functioned as a precise sighting device. The centre lines of the two windows have azimuths of 358° and 62°. Taking into account refraction, we estimate the azimuth of the first gleam of the summer solstice Sun 6,000 years before the present to have been 63.2°, which would have been visible through the slots of the circle.”17
Figure 3.1. Approximate map of Calendar Circle showing the solstice gates and the meridian gates. Upper image is the Calendar Circle in its ruined state in 2008.
Although we can say that the ancient builders intended the circle’s southeast gate to point to the rising sun on the longest day of the year, it is nonetheless an approximate alignment; the width of the gate varies 2 degrees in either direction and thus cannot be used for dating purposes with the sunrise because the changes in Earth obliquity over the past six thousand years is much less than 2 degrees. As a matter of fact, the approximate solstice alignment of the Calendar Circle is as valid today as it was six thousand years ago. It is also an exaggeration to call the stone circle a calendar simply because it has an alignment to the summer solstice. Indeed, neither the solstice gate nor the stone circle as a whole can be used as a calendar in the modern sense of the word. Further, although we, too, call it a Calendar Circle here, it seems that Malville’s Nabta Playa tag of “six-thousand-year-old calendar” was more influenced by the nearby excavations that contained artifacts that could be radiocarbon analyzed and were dated to this epoch than by the astronomical alignments of the stones. Actually, the only real astronomy that can be derived from the 1998 Nature letter is that Nabta Playa is located near the Tropic of Cancer, implying that the standing stones would cast no shadows at noon on the summer solstice (June 21), a feature that modern achaeoastronomers often considered as significant to ancient cultures.18 Thus according to Malville and colleagues, “At this latitude, the Sun crosses the zenith on two days, approximately three weeks before and after the summer solstice. Vertical structures cast no shadows under the zenith Sun, and within the tropics the day of the zenith Sun is often regarded as a significant event.”19
Truthfully, the only actual astronomy reported in the Nature letter was that a small stone circle had an approximate solstice alignment and stood near the Tropic of Cancer. This fact, on its own, was not extremely impressive. As one prize-winning archaeoastronomer put it recently at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, “you can be a primitive ape man and make a solstice alignment!” implying that scholars should start with the assumption that the people of Nabta Playa were simply primitive brutes. Yet all paleoanthropologists agree that the human brain ten thousand or more years ago was essentially identical to our own brain, and, as professor emeritus Archibald Roy of Glasgow University often remarks, “there were Einsteins and Newtons then,” geniuses who were just as quick-thinking and astute as we are today but who had to apply their intelligence without the science and technology that we have. It is true that setting a few stones in rough alignment to the summer solstice did not require the power of an Enstein or a Newton, so what were the anthropologists of Nabta Playa really so excited about—as the 1998 Nature letter clearly implied? Apart from being perhaps the oldest astronomical site in the world, is it possible that something else at Nabta Playa had hinted to them that at the site there was much more there than meets the eye—which they were not yet ready to disclose?
INEXPLICABLE CONSTRUCTIONS
In addition to tumuli tombs of cattle (see chapter 1), the CPE anthropologists also found collections of large, oval-shaped megaliths on top of the playa sediments, which they called complex structures (also see chapter 1). They had hoped that these were the top parts of tombs belonging to high-status individuals or even kings, but when they excavated beneath these complex structures, they were surprised to find not human or animal remains, as they had hoped, but strange sculpted lumps of bedrock some 4 meters (about 13 feet) below the ground. The largest of these complex structures, which the CPE had labeled Complex Structure A, or simply CSA, also contained buried underneath it a huge human-sculpted megalith, which was pl
aced over the sculpted lump of bedrock that lay 4 meters (about 13 feet) under the surface! According to Fred Wendorf and colleagues, in CSA, “. . . [W]e found a sculptured rock, which has some resemblance to a cow. It was standing upright with its base 2 m [about 7 feet] below the surface, and its long axis was oriented a few degrees west of north. The rock had been blocked into place by two smaller slabs. Further beneath it, at a depth of 4 m [about 13 feet], the shaped table (bed) rock had a similar northward orientation.”20
CSA consisted of a group of megalithic stones laid in oval formation on the surface of the ground. Below this oval structure, some 3 meters (about 10 feet) down, was buried the oddly shaped megalithic sculpture labeled the cow stone by the CPE. Directly beneath this cow stone sculpture there was a large, sculpted lump of bedrock that was still attached to the natural table rock strata that lay under the playa sediment. CSA was clearly the main feature of the whole ceremonial complex, for not only was it the largest megalithic structure at Nabta Playa, but it was also the focal point of several other megalithic stones alignments that had been placed upright in the playa sediments (but most of which people have toppled since). These aligned megaliths averaged 2 by 3 meters (7 by 10 feet) and were placed in rows running more than a kilometer (about 0.6 mile) toward the east and north horizons. They all radiated out of CSA like spokes of a bicycle wheel. The 1998 Nature letter gave the precise azimuths of five megalith lines, which seemed to imply some important symbolic meaning, although the CPE offered no suggestion as to what this might be. The only interpretation by Malville and colleagues was that “the megalithic complex may have been an expression of interconnections between the Sun, water, death, and the fertile Earth. . . .”21
The Nature letter also pointed out that “no star was visible at the north celestial pole during most of the occupation at Nabta”22 and made no mention of possible stellar orientation for the megalithic alignments. One of the megalithic alignments was reported to have an azimuth of 90.02 degrees, suggesting an incredibly high level of accuracy and knowledge of the cardinal direction east for observations without fine optical instruments.*5
Figure 3.2. Excavation of the cow stone central sculpture from Complex Structure A at Nabta Playa
Figure 3.3. Upper left: Thomas Brophy with one of the megaliths that composed the surface of Complex Structure A (CSA). Upper right: Artist’s depiction of a Complex Structure surface arrangement of megaliths. Middle left: Artist’s depiction of CSA as it was before excavation, looking west, as if seeing through the sediments. The cow stone sculpture is suspended in the sediments between the surface of the ground (top of image) and the bedrock sculpture (bottom of image). Middle right: CSA viewed looking north. Bottom: Excavators’ line drawing of CSA, cow stone sculpture, and bedrock sculpture, looking west (at left) and looking north (at right). (Artist depictions by Doug Thompson for Carmen Boulter. Line drawings courtesy of the CPE, adapted from Wendorf and Schild eds., Holocene Settlement of the Egyptian Sahara, vol. 1, “The Complex Structures or Shrines” by Fred Wendorf and Halina Krolik, p. 509.)
We were a bit apprehensive of the many inconsistencies in the 1998 Nature letter and also wondered why no suggestion was made for any possible alignments to stars. As it turned out, however, this was to come a few years later from the CPE.23
THE 2001 OFFICIAL SITE REPORT: RELUCTANT INTRODUCTION OF THE STARS
In 2001, two years after the Nature letter and twenty-five years after the discovery of Nabta Playa itself, the CPE finally published an extensive report of their excavations in book format edited by Fred Wendorf and Romuald Schild. It included the contributions of twenty-two articles by various participants in the archaeological work at Nabta Playa since its discovery.
One article in the book, titled “The Megalithic Alignments,” was coauthored by Wendorf and Malville and gave a description of the various megalithic structures—and discussed stellar alignments at Nabta Playa. Indeed, the megalithic alignments that were now declared to have such stellar alignments were all those that radiated from CSA. Seen as a whole, CSA itself was the most elaborate member of a group of about thirty complex structures built in the playa silts and covering an area of about two football fields. This area was located some 2 kilometers (about 1 mile) south of the Calendar Circle and included the rows of megalithic alignments that emanated 2 kilometers from CSA to the northeast and southwest. With stellar alignments now identified at Nabta Playa, the site took on a completely new meaning and importance, which, even at this early stage, suggested there was some deep message—symbolic or practical—that had to be understood and interpreted. Before we investigate this message further, we must first familiarize ourselves in more detail with the thirty or so complex structures at Nabta Playa, which were the subject of another article in the CPE book written by Wendorf and Krolik.24
According to this article, each complex structure consisted of a cluster of megaliths arranged in an oval shape that measured some 5 to 7 meters (16 to 23 feet) long and 4 to 6 meters (13 to 20 feet) wide, with the longer axis oriented to a position slightly offset from the north-south meridian. The megaliths in each cluster were either placed on top of the playa silts or had been embedded in it. Some of the stones were still standing at the time of the article, but many have since fallen. The largest ones were placed in the center of the oval clusters, and although this was not mentioned by Wendorf and Krolik, we noted (when we finally traveled to see the megaliths for ourselves in 2003) that a few of the structures were partially sculpted with strange curves and angles that were clearly made by human hands.25
One of the odd aspects of these complex structures was that they were placed above the sculpted lumps of bedrock (about 3 or 4 meters under playa sediments, the exact depths are different for each complex structure). Only one complex structure (CSA) contained in addition a separate “cow stone” sculpture that was hidden about 3 meters (about 10 feet) beneath the ground. Two complex structures were fully excavated, and on another three, only borehole tests were performed—yet this was enough to confirm that all the structures had beneath them sculpted bedrock, and the results also implied that all the remaining twenty-five or so complex structures had been built in the same way. We will later look at the possible meaning of these mysterious complex structures, but meanwhile, let us examine how and when they were built.
The CPE has established that the silt upon which the complex structures were built dates to 5100 BCE. This means that the visible part of these structures (the stone ovals) cannot be older than this date. Yet the bedrock that lies some 4 meters (13 feet) or more beneath the surface is surrounded by sediment that is dated from about 9000 BCE to 5100 BCE, which would indicate that the lumps of bedrock were sculpted by human hands at a time that was much earlier than the manufacture of the oval of stones that we see today on the surface. These sculpted lumps of bedrock are of hard quartzitic sandstone that remained in place after the softer surrounding sandstone was eroded by wind, long before 9000 BCE, and they were sculpted sometime before they were incorporated into the complex structures. How did the ancient builders who constructed the oval of stones on the surface know that deep beneath the spot they had chosen were these strange outcrops of bedrock? Wendorf and Krolik show their bafflement when they write: “How and why the builders of these [complex] structures located the buried bedrocks is not known. They may have used probes or dug pits. . . . Whatever technique was used to find the bedrock, when it was located, a large and deep enough pit was dug to expose the entire circumference of the [bed]rock . . . up to 5 meters [about 16 feet] in diameter at the base and 3.5 m [about 11 feet] or more deep. . . . Dug through heavy silts and clays, the pits required a major effort.”26
According to Wendorf and Krolik, the ancient builders then sculpted the bedrock and, in at least the case of Complex Structure A (CSA), filled the pit partially; placed another megalithic sculpture, the so-called cow stone; and then filled the pit completely to make it level with playa silts. The final operation was then to make an oval of
megaliths on the surface of the silts. We can note, however, another, more natural solution to this mystery:
Wendorf and Krolik theorize that CSA and thirty nearby similar Complex Structures were all constructed entirely after the sediments were lay down, with the builders locating subsurface bedrock lumps suitable for sculpting using some unknown method for knowing what is under the sand. Given that parts of CSA and the other Complex Structures consist of sculpted bedrock under the playa sediments, it is reasonable to think that something was possibly constructed there before or during the playa sedimentation, and only the final stage of construction occurred at or after the end of the last major humid interphase.27
In other words, it is possible that whoever partially sculpted the lumps of bedrock that lie about 4 meters (about 13 feet) below the surface were at Nabta Playa thousands of years before the final stage of the complex structures was completed (that is, before the placement of the oval of stones that lie on the surface of the earth today).
In 2007, after reading our paper (“Satellite Imagery Measures of the Astronomically Aligned Megaliths at Nabta Playa”), Malville, Schild, and Wendorf came to agree with the possibility that the bedrock sculptures of the complex structures were created much earlier than previously thought. Thus, accordingly, they wrote: “How or why the buried table rocks were chosen remains a puzzle. It seems unlikely that the rocks had been found accidentally during excavation for wells, as these were in dunes at the edge of the playa and not in the playa sediments. It is conceivable that these round, large quartzitic lenses were part of the symbolic landscape of the Middle Neolithic and became significant before the establishment of the complex ceremonial centre. Perhaps their locations had been marked by rock cairns before gradual burial by playa sediments.”28
Black Genesis Page 9