The immense importance of the stars, especially Sirius, to the ancient Egyptians is recognized by all Egyptologists. Sirius, as is well-known, marked New Year’s Day and also served as a cosmic herald of the Nile’s annual flood. More important, Sirius was directly associated with the rebirth of kings. Dr. Jaromir Malek, director of the Griffith Institute at Oxford, writes, “The Nile and its annual flooding were dominant factors in the newly formed Egyptian state”;3 and Dr. Richard Wilkinson, Egyptologist at the University of Arizona, adds that the great importance of Sirius to the ancient Egyptians “lay in the fact that the star’s annual appearance on the eastern horizon at dawn heralded the approximate beginning of the Nile’s annual inundation.”4 Likewise, Dr. Ian Shaw of Liverpool University and Paul Nicholson of Cardiff University write that “the Egyptian year was considered to begin on . . . the date of the heliacal rising of the Dog Star, Sirius.”5
When we observe the daily cycle of Sirius, or indeed of any other star that rises and sets, the place of rising in the east will always be the same—that is, it will have the same azimuth.*45 By placing two or more markers in a straight line aimed at the rising place of a star, such as the upright stones placed at Nabta Playa, an observer can witness that same star rising at that same spot each day. Strictly speaking, however, this is not quite true, for the star has, in fact, moved a bit, but so minute is this movement in one day—about 0.00004 of a single degree—that it is not possible to notice except with the finest optical instrument. This slight progressive movement is due, as we have seen in previous chapters, to the precession of the equinoxes—that slow, gyrating motion of Earth, one full cycle of which takes about twenty-six thousand years. Yet although it is not perceptible on a daily or even yearly basis, we can notice it over the span of a human life. For each seventy-two years the change in rising position will be about 1 degree—that is, about the thickness of a thumb with the hand outstretched.†46
Because the prehistoric star watchers of Nabta Playa observed the rising of stars over several generations and had originally marked their rising points with straight lines of stones, they would surely have become aware that the rising position changed over time. As we have seen in chapter 4, there is even evidence they had a subtle and elegant concept of precessional motion. According to the latest estimates of Wendorf and Schild, Nabta Playa began functioning as a regional ceremonial center during the Middle Neolithic (6100–5500 BCE) and remained in use until about 3500 BCE—thus for at least two millennia of stellar observations. There is also evidence that the site was visited as far back as the early Holocene Period (9000–6100 BCE), thereby giving an even longer observation period. They further explain that “[f]ollowing a major drought which drove earlier groups from the desert, the Late Neolithic began around 5500 BC with new groups that had a complex social system expressed in a degree of organization and control not previously seen. These new people, the Cattle Herders (also known as Ru’at El Baqar people) appear to have been responsible for the ceremonial complex at Nabta Playa. The newcomers had a complex social system that displayed a degree of organization and control not previously seen in Egypt.”6
We saw in chapter 4 that the people of Nabta focused their social system that displayed a degree of organization and contol onto creating a megalithic astro-ceremonial complex. One primary feature of that complex was repeated alignments to the rising of Sirius and to the circumpolar Bull’s Thigh stars. We might ask, then, why the ancient astronomers of Nabta Playa also marked the rising of the star Sirius. What significance could this have had? In asking this, we are suddenly reminded that this star had its so-called heliacal rising at around the summer solstice, and that it was at this time of year that there began the monsoon rains that filled the lake at Nabta Playa. We can also remember that there was indeed such a summer solstice alignment at Nabta Playa defined by the so-called gate of the calendar circle. Was it possible that these alignments had been intended to work together in order to mark a direction as well as a specific time of year? In other words, could the astronomy of Nabta Playa have served as a point that gave a specific direction at a specific time of year? If so, what did it point to, and at what time of year?
MOVING EAST TOWARD THE NILE VALLEY
Around 6000 BCE, the heavy monsoon rains began to come regularly during the summer solstice season to fill the large depression at Nabta Playa, turning it into a shallow, temporary lake and the region around it into lush prairies that were idyllic for grazing cattle. Further, it was this hydraulic miracle that attracted the so-called Ru’at El Baqar, or cattle people, every monsoon season. Year after year, the cattle people came around the time of the summer solstice to set up camp, graze their cattle on the thick, soft grass along the playa, and remain until the lake eventually dried up some six months later, in midwinter.
In this southern region of the Egyptian Sahara the summer nights are warm and crystal clear, and the starry firmament is a truly marvelous sight to watch. It looms above like a giant cupola or a canopy of twinkling lights that very slowly but perceptibly move majestically from east to west. The constellations appear to be so close that we might be tempted to ignore common sense and reach out to touch them. In these nightly displays, the cattle people had ample time to study the stars, perhaps even name some of the brighter ones and define the more striking of the constellations, such as Orion and the Big Dipper. Surely they passed down their star lore over many generations. Because they were so dependent on their cattle, it was appropriate that they might have noticed that the seven-star asterism of the Big Dipper looked uncannily like the leg of a cow or bull, and that the large constellation of Orion appeared to be a striding giant herdsman holding a staff. Further, it was most likey apt that the heliacal rising of the brightest star of all, Sirius, which hung below Orion’s foot, was seen as a sort of beginning or rebirth or, better still, the start of the year to mark the fertility of the coming lifegiving monsoon rains. Certainly these assumptions occurred to Wendorf and his team when they worked at Nabta Playa, for it was reported in The New Scientist that
by 1998, Wendorf ’s team had found megaliths scattered right across the western edge of the playa. Hoping to fathom what the nomads were up to, Wendorf invited University of Colorado astronomer Kim Malville to Nabta. Malville confirmed that the stones formed a series of stellar alignments, radiating like spokes from the site of the cow sculpture [Complex Structure A]. One of the alignments points to the belt of Orion, a constellation that appears in late spring. Three more indicate the rising points of Dubhe, the brightest star in Ursa Major [Big Dipper], which the Pharaohs saw as the leg of a cow. Most intriguing, though, is the parade of six megaliths marking the rising position of Sirius—the brightest star in the sky—as it would have appeared 6800 years ago. By that time, says Wendorf, the rains would have started their gradual retreat, and the alignments may have been an attempt to seek help from supernatural forces. To Malville, this seemed an incredible coincidence. Sirius was also of great importance to the civilisations of the Nile, which worshipped it as Sothis. The earliest known Egyptian calendars were calibrated to Sothis’s appearance as a morning star, when the days were longest and monsoon rains flooded the crop fields along the Nile. Sothis was depicted as a cow with a young plant between her horns. To later dynasties, Sothis was known as Hathor—mother of the pharaohs.7
We have seen that around the fifth millennium BCE the cattle people worked out a way to stay permanently at Nabta Playa by digging deep wells to sustain them through the six months when the lake was dry from midwinter to midsummer. Now they could grow some basic cereal crops and hunt hare and gazelle that also came to the lake when it was full. They rarely, however, slaughtered their own cattle, for these were now considered sacred. They only used them for milk and perhaps blood, very much like the Masai herders of eastern Africa.*47
With plenty of leisure time on their hands in the evenings and at night, their knowledge of the sky and its cycles increased, and the cattle people thus began to develop compl
ex ideologies of life and death and to devise rituals and ceremonies to mark special days of the year. They gradually built the vast ceremonial complex we see today, using large stones quarried from the nearby bedrock. In the intellectual and spiritual sense, they moved a few steps up the cultural ladder to discard their cattle-people descriptor and become the Ru’at El Asam people, the megalith builders or, as we now prefer to call them, the star people.
Thus life for these people went on peacefully for generations until around 3300 BCE, when huge changes in the climate caused the lake to recede and the wells to dry up. It soon became obvious that they could not stay here much longer. For centuries they had heard of a wonderful river valley in the east, a cornucopia of plenty, with miles upon miles of banks of green pastures—a place where food and fresh water could be found in abundance. Indeed, their distant ancestors had trade relations with the people of the Nile Valley and even more distant regions. Therefore, forced out by the climate and lured by the legend of the great river, the people of Nabta Playa turned their attention east, toward the place of the rising sun, and dreamed of a new life in the green valley yonder. When they could stay in the desert no more, they rounded up their cattle, packed their meager belongings, and, leaving the ceremonial complex with its stone circle, tumuli, and alignments that their ancestors had raised, they started their march to a new promised land. According to one of the most prominent anthropologists of the Egyptian Sahara, Romuald Schild writes, “And where might they have gone if not to the relatively close Nile Valley? They brought with them the various achievements of their culture and their belief system. Perhaps it was indeed these people who provided the crucial stimulus towards the emergence of state organization in ancient Egypt.” Fred Wendorf echoes these words: “About the time the rains were falling off in the desert, the people in the Nile Valley suddenly started taking an interest in cows, building things with big stones, and getting interested in star worship and solar observatories. Is it possible that the Nabta nomads migrated up the Nile, influencing the great Egyptian dynasties?”8 Fekry Hassan, professor of Egyptology at London University, adds: “It is very likely that the concept of the cow goddess in dynastic Egypt is a continuation of a much older tradition of a primordial cow goddess or goddesses that emerged in the context of Neolithic herding in the Egyptian Sahara.”9
The modern town of Abu Simbel lies only 100 kilometers (62 miles) due east of Nabta Playa—three to four days’ journey on foot. This would have been the most obvious route to take to reach the Nile Valley. We recall, however, that the central theme of the desert peoples’ cosmological beliefs was fixated on the summer solstice sunrise—the time when both sunrise and the appearance of Orion and Sirius at dawn heralded the monsoon rains that brought life to the desert. Now that the rains came no more, however, did they still look toward the summer solstice for guidance? What propitious sign might the cattle people have taken? The Calendar Circle’s summer solstice has an alignment to azimuth of about 62 degrees—that is, the place of sunrise at summer solstice. Was this a sort of prehistoric pointer for an exodus from Nabta Playa toward the Nile Valley? Was there among the star people of Nabta Playa a prehistoric Moses who led the way toward the rising sun and took his people toward a promised land in the east? At summer solstice the sun remains at more or less the same place for about eight days, with a variation of azimuth as little as 2-arc minutes.10 This means that the party of people leaving Nabta Playa had ample time to reach the Nile Valley by walking toward the sunrise. To where might this direction of azimuth 62 degrees have finally led them?
THE SACRED ISLAND OF ELEPHANTINE
The region of Aswan is some 250 kilometers (155 miles) northeast of Nabta Playa. A party traveling from Nabta Playa toward the rising sun at summer solstice would have reached Aswan after a journey of four to five days. This region is without doubt the choicest place to settle in the Nile Valley. The climate is perfect, with sunshine throughout the year, and at Aswan the river is at its very best—wide with clean, clear water dotted with beautiful islands, the most beautiful being the island of Elephantine.
Elephantine, as far as islands go, is rather small. It is 1.2 kilometers (.75 mile) long and 0.5 kilometer (.3 mile) wide and is located downriver within sight of the first cataract*48 and opposite the modern town of Aswan. Today half of the island has been developed into a tourist resort, but the remainder is an archaeological wonderland that contains the great temple of Khnum and the lovely temple of the goddess Satis, as well as many other ancient vestiges from the entire age of ancient Egypt. There are no bridges that link the island to the mainland; it can be accessed only by boat or ferry. On the east of the island and across the river is the lush Nile Valley, to the west are high sand dunes, and beyond them is the open desert. The Nile here is at its widest, about 1 kilometer (.62 mile), and the water is clear, cool, and wonderfully refreshing. The banks are lined with palm and banana trees, and there are many colorful bougainvillea and oleander trees. Sunset brings hundreds of white egrets to perch on the trees, and there they look like winged snowflakes or angels. At daybreak the water buffaloes, Egypt’s most ancient and strongest beasts of labor, graze in the shallows while local women do their laundry. Here, life is as it has always been for thousands of years: peaceful, serene, and timeless. An enthusiastic seventeenth-century English traveler, George Sandys, wrote of this place:
. . . than the waters whereof there is none more sweete: being not unpleasantly cold, and of all others the most wholesome. Confirmed by that answer of Pescenius Niger unto his murmuring soldiery, “What? Crave you wine and have Nilus to drinke of?” . . . So much it nourisheth, as that the inhabitants thinke that it forthwith converteth into bloud. . . . Besides it procureth liberall urine, cureth the dolour of the veins, and is most soveraigne against that windy melancholy arising from the shorter ribs, which so saddeth the mind of the diseased.11
In very ancient times, Elephantine was the capital of the First Nome (district) of Upper Egypt. It was considered a place sacred to Khnum, the ram-headed creator god who is said to have fashioned humankind on his potter’s wheel. Khnum’s consort was the goddess Satet—also known as Satis. The notoriety of Elephantine rested on the belief that it was here where the floodwaters emerged from the underworld, or Duat, to rejuvenate the land of Egypt.12
The goddess Satis was regarded as the protector of Egypt’s southern frontier, and as such she was depicted holding a bow and arrows. She was also the guardian of the source of the flood and, as such, was identified with the star Sirius, whose heliacal rising occurred in conjunction with the beginning of the flood season.13 The goddess Satis is attested in ancient texts as early as 2700 BCE, and her name is found on pottery as far north as Saqqara, nearly 900 kilometers (559 miles) from Elephantine. We also find her name inscribed in pyramids of the fourth and fifth dynasties (ca. 2300 BCE), where she is said to purify the body of the dead king with the rejuvenating flood waters brought in jars from Elephantine.14 Satis is depicted as a tall, slender woman wearing the White Crown of Upper Egypt with antelope horns. In Egypt the antelope lives in the desert, which may symbolize the origins of Satis. On the crown is often drawn a five-pointed star, which represents Sirius. Her many epithets—Lady of Stars, Mistress of the Eastern Horizon of the Sky at Whose Sight Everyone Rejoices, The Great One in the Sky, Ruler of the Stars, Satis Who Brightens the Two Lands with her Beauty—are clearly allusions to her important identification with the star Sirius.15 Her beautiful, small temple on Elephantine is just north of the much larger temple of her consort, Khnum. Excavation and restoration of the Satis temple by the German Archaelogy Institute of Cairo has been ongoing since 1969, and although the restored temple that is seen today dates from the Ptolemaic period,16 beneath it are the remains of several earlier temples, stacked one atop the other like tiers on a wedding cake, going back to the predynastic period. In all, there are seven temples, the lowest being a simple shrine that dates from about 3200 BCE. Above it are two Old Kingdom shrines that date to around 2
250 BCE, and above these are two Middle Kingdom temples that date to circa 1950 BCE. These are surmounted by a New Kingdom shrine built by Queen Hatshepsut, around 1480 BCE, and finally, at the very top, is the restored Ptolemaic temple, which dates to the second century BCE.*49 17
In 1983 the American astronomer Ron Wells of the University of California took an interest in the alignments of the many superimposed Satis temples.18 Working under the aegis of the Swiss Archaeological Institute in Cairo, Wells was permitted to take azimuth measurements of all the temples that were stacked on top of each other. It quickly became obvious to him that the azimuths of the temples differed slightly from one another, progressively changing in a counterclockwise direction. To a trained astronomer, this implied that the ancient builders were tracking the rising point of a celestial object, which changed azimuth proportionally. Ron Wells knew of the symbolic links between the goddess Satis and the star Sirius and thus had a hunch that the changing azimuths of the temple’s axes through the epoch may have something to do with the changing azimuths of the rising of Sirius. Making use of the pole star Polaris (Alpha Canis Minor) to establish true north, Wells calculated the azimuth of the topmost (Ptolemaic) temple and found it to be 114.65 degrees. He then calculated the azimuth of the earlier (New Kingdom) temple beneath it and found it to be 120.60 degrees. The 5.95-degree difference in azimuth exactly matched the difference in azimuth of Sirius for the same two epochs!19
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