The British astronomer R. W. Sloley reminds us, and with good reason, that “ultimately, our clocks are really timed by the stars. The master-clock is our earth, turning on its axis relative to the fixed stars.”58 Further, the American astronomer and director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, Ed Krupp, points out that “celestial aligned architecture and celestially timed ceremonies tell us our ancestors watched the sky accurately and systematically.”59 What we may most want to know is whether Egyptians also used the stars for long-term computations of time, such as the Sothic cycle of 1,460 years. Perhaps this is why the ancient Egyptians deliberately opted not to have the leap year—so that their slipping calendar could also work for long-term Sothic dates.
Providence would have it that a Roman citizen named Censorinus visited Egypt in the third century CE and witnessed the festivities in Alexandria that marked the start of a new Sothic cycle. This is what he reported: “The beginnings of these [Sothic] years are always reckoned from the first day of that month which is called by the Egyptians Thoth, which happened this year [239 CE] upon the 7th of the kalends of July [June 25]. For a hundred years ago from the present year [139 CE] the same fell upon the 12th of the kalends of August [July 21], on which day Canicula [Sirius] regularly rises in Egypt.”60
To put it more simply, the Egyptian New Year’s Day (1 Thoth of the Egyptian calendar) recoincided with the heliacal rising of Sirius in the year 139 CE.*56 Egypt was at that time a dominion of Rome and was ruled by Emperor Antonius Pius. This calendrical-astronomical event was clearly regarded as having great importance and was commemorated on a coin at Alexandria bearing the Greek word AION, implying the end or start of an era. At any rate, this information provided modern chronologists with an anchor date from which they could easily work out the start of previous Sothic cycles by simply subtracting increments of 1,460 years from 139 CE. Thus we know that Sothic cycles began on 1321 BCE, 2781 BCE, 4241 BCE, and so forth. Yet do the Sothic cycles hark back ad infinitum, or is there a Year Zero, as in other calendrical systems?
Even though the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with the idea of eternity, they also believed in a beginning of a secular time they called Zep Tepi, literally, the First Time. The British Egyptologist Rundle T. Clark comes tantalizingly close to the very heart of ancient Egyptian cosmogony when he writes that all rituals and feasts, most of which were linked to the cycle of the year, were “a repetition of an event that took place at the beginning of the world.”61 According to Clark,
This epoch—zep tepi—“the First Time”—stretched from the first stirring of the High God in the Primeval Waters. . . . All proper myths relate events or manifestations of this epoch. Anything whose existence or authority had to be justified or explained must be referred to the “First Time.” This was true for natural phenomena, rituals, royal insignia, the plans of temples, magical or medical formulae, the hieroglyphic system of writing, the calendar—the whole paraphernalia of the civilization . . . all that was good or efficacious was established on the principles laid down in the “First Time”—which was, therefore, a golden age of absolute perfection . . .62
The start of Sothic cycles, as we have seen, can be computed simply by moving backward or forward in increments of 1,460 years using Censorinus’s anchor point of 139 CE. At the resulting years of Sothic cycles, the heliacal rising of Sirius coincided with New Year’s Day (1 Thoth) of the calendar of ancient Egypt, but can we track these cycles back to Zep Tepi, the First Time . . . to the Year Zero of this calendar?
THE GREAT PYRAMID AND ZEP TEPI
In 1987, Robert Bauval sent a paper to the academic journal Discussions in Egyptology presenting a new and controversial theory on the Giza pyramids. The theory had been developed when, in 1983, Bauval was working in Saudi Arabia in the construction industry. One night while there, in the open desert, he made an unusual discovery involving the stars of Orion’s belt and the Giza pyramids. While looking at the three stars of Orion’s belt, it struck him that their pattern and also their position relative to the Milky Way uncannily resembled the pattern formed by the three pyramids of Giza and their position relative to the Nile. This curious similarity did not seem a coincidence, for not only did the ancient Pyramid Texts identify Orion with the god Osiris, who in turn was identified with the departed kings, but the ancient Egyptians also specified Orion as being in the celestial Duat.63 The correlation between the three stars of Orion’s belt and the three pyramids of Giza was striking, if only for one reason: Orion’s belt is made up of two bright stars and a less bright third star. This last is slightly offset to the left of the extended alignment created by the two other stars, much the same way that the third, smaller pyramid is slightly offset from the other two.
A fact that adds to this correlation was discovered in 1964 by two academics from UCLA, the Egyptologist Alexander Badawi and the astronomer Virginia Trimble, who proved that a narrow shaft emanating southward and upward from the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid had once pointed to Orion’s belt in about 2500 BCE, the date traditionally ascribed to the building of this monument. Later, in 1990, Bauval published another article in Discussions in Egyptology showing that from the Queen’s Chamber is another shaft that points to the star Sirius at that same date. In 1994, Bauval published The Orion Mystery, which presented his theory to the general public.*57
Figure 6.1. The pyramids of Giza and the stars of Orion’s belt as they appeared in 2500 BCE and 11,500 BCE
The book, which has been the subject of numerous television documentaries, caused quite a stir at the time of its publiction and is still the subject of much controversy. More recently, in his book The Egypt Code, Bauval puts forward the final conclusion that the Giza pyramids may have been modeled on an image of Orion’s belt not at the time of their presumed construction circa 2500 BCE, but at a much earlier time, circa 11,450 BCE. In other words, in deciphering the astronomy embedded in the design of the Giza pyramids, we can note the locking of two dates: 2500 BCE, which marks the time of construction, and 11,500 BCE, which marks the significant time that might allude to the First Time—Zep Tepi. This is our reasoning: If today you observe from the location of Giza the star Sirius cross the meridian it will be at 43 degrees altitude. If you could see the same event in 2500 BCE when the Great Pyramid was built, Sirius would have culminated at 39.5 degrees altitude, which is where the south shaft of the Queen’s Chamber was aimed. Going even further in time the altitude of Sirius would drop and drop until, at about 11,500 BCE, Sirius would be just 1 degree altitude. Beyond this date Sirius would not have been seen at all because it would not break above the horizon.
In appendix 1 we look in detail at the motion of Sirius and find that Giza was actually the place on Earth where Sirius went down to rest briefly exactly on the horizon at the lowest point of its twenty-sixthousand-year cycle, and that occurred basically in this same epoch, circa 12,280 BCE. Further, we find that the light of the Mother of All Pole Stars, Vega, shone down the subterranean passages at Giza and Dashur in the same epoch, 12,070 BCE. In appendix 1 we also review how the Orion’s belt-to-pyramids layout dates are also in this same general epoch. It is now well accepted that in the Great Pyramid the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber marks the date of 2500 BCE, around the construction date of the monument—but what other shaft elsewhere in the Great Pyramid marks Zep Tepi?
The internal design of the Great Pyramid has been the source of numerous theories, none of which have provided a satisfactory solution to the many questions it poses or solves the great mystery that has baffled generations of researchers. In spite of this, Egyptologists are nonetheless adamant that the Great Pyramid served a funerary purpose, and they point for evidence to the so-called King’s Chamber and the empty and undecorated sarcophagus in this otherwise totally barren and totally uninscribed room. At first this consensus appears convincing, but for the troublesome fact that there are two other chambers in the pyramid: the so-called Queen’s Chamber, which lies some 21 meters (69 feet) beneat
h the King’s Chamber, and also the so-called subterranean chamber that is 20 meters (66 feet) beneath the pyramid’s base and cuts into the living rock. At a loss to explain why three sepulcher chambers would be needed for only one dead king, Egyptologists for a long time had assumed that the subterranean chamber and the Queen’s Chamber were abandoned and that the ancient architect had for some reason changed his design three times regarding where the burial chamber should be. Today this abandonment theory has itself been abandoned. Most modern architects and construction engineers believe the entire monument was constructed according to a well-established plan, which was executed without any major alterations. There is, too, the nagging fact that no mummy or corpse was ever found in the Great Pyramid or, for that matter, in any other royal pyramid in Egypt. True, many pyramids contained empty sarcophagi, but this does not necessarily mean that these sarcophagi were meant for dead bodies. They could easily have served a ritual function rather than a practical function as coffins. Perhaps the most convincing fact that the Great Pyramid was not a tomb—or at least, not only a tomb—is that its design contains detailed and accurate astronomical and mathematical data that, if properly understood and decoded, seem to suggest a completely different message than that claimed by Egyptologists.
Figure 6.2. The Great Pyramid of Giza’s subterranean passage and internal platform aligned to the North Star, Vega, and to Sirius at Zep Tepi. The star shafts built into the upper portions of the completed pyramid aligned to the same and related stars during the Old Kingdom fourth dynasty.
Returning to the question of the date of Zep Tepi and the internal design of the Great Pyramid, the fact that the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber was aimed at Sirius about 2500 BCE, when the star was at 39.5 degrees and was at essentially 0 degrees in the centuries around 12,200 BCE, when it rested on the horizon as seen from Giza, and the fact that the cycles of Sirius were used by the pyramid builders for both long-term and short-term calendric computations justifies a surmise that the horizontal passage leading to the Queen’s Chamber was intended to mark the 0-degree altitude of Sirius at its southern culmination. If the Great Pyramid was designed to symbolize one thing, it is, without question, the sky vault—for the perimeter of the pyramid’s square base relative to its height represents the same ratio as the circumference of a circle to its radius. We are to think of the Great Pyramid, therefore, not as a pyramid at all, but as a symbolic hemisphere or as a reduced model of the hemispherical sky vault above it.
The southern shaft in the Queen’s Chamber invites us to consider two altitudes of the star Sirius, one at 39.5 degrees and the other at 0 degrees, thus determining two dates: 2500 BCE, which is probably the actual construction date of the pyramid, and 12,000 BCE, which represents a date in the remote past that has to do with the beginning or first time of the ancient Egyptians’ history defined with calendrical computations of the Sothic cycle and precession cycle of the star Sirius. But is there confirming evidence of such long-term date reckoning in Egyptian pyramid designs?
Figure 6.3. Sirius culminated south so that it just met the horizon—as seen from the latitude of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
THE GREAT WALL OF TIME
In The Egypt Code, we demonstrated that evidence of both the Sothic cycle and precession involving the star Sirius could be found in the elaborate design of the step pyramid complex of King Djoser at Saqqara or, more precisely, in the design of the gigantic boundary wall that surrounds the complex (see figure 6.4). The step pyramid complex is dated to about 2650 BCE and is said to be the very first major architectural complex of ancient Egypt and, according to many, the oldest in the whole world. It is one of those curious facts of history that we actually know the name and function of the architect who was responsible for its design: his name was Imhotep, and he was vizier to King Djoser. According to professor I. E. S. Edwards, “Imhotep’s title ‘Chief of the Observers,’ which became the regular title of the high priest of Heliopolis, may itself suggest an occupation connected with astral, rather than solar observation. . . . It is significant that the high priest of the centre of the sun-cult at Heliopolis bore the title ‘Chief of the Astronomers’ and was represented wearing a mantle adorned with stars.”64
Figure 6.4. Djoser step pyramid complex and Saqqara, showing the massive wall enclosing the compound. Inset: Detail of the reconstructed portion of the paneled wall around the main entrance.
In the recently built museum at the reception area at Saqqara, Imhotep is given a place of honor, and there are several statues representing this Leonardo da Vinci of the ancient world. His name, titles, and functions are attested on the pedestal of a statue of King Djoser. As we have seen, it seems certain that a calendar based on the heliacal rising of Sirius was used since earliest time in Egypt and was referred to sometimes as the Sothic calendar. It also seems certain that this calendar was eventually formally adopted by the Heliopolitan priests, who pinned it to their own newly devised civil calendar, when a Sothic cycle was made to begin with the New Year’s Day of 1 Thoth. It is thus quite possible that it was Imhotep who introduced the Sothic calendar based on the cycles of Sirius, or, as we now strongly suspect, merely formalized it from an earlier calendar that was already in place with the prehistoric star people of Nabta Playa. At any rate, much evidence supports the view that a Sothic calendar ran parallel to a civil calendar so that they both resynchronized every 1,460 years—that is, every Sothic cycle. According to the science historian Gerald J. Whitrow, “there is reason to associate this with the minister of king Djoser of the Third Dynasty known as Imhotep.”65 Bearing this in mind and also recalling that Imhotep was the architect of the very first pyramid complex in Egypt, we would expect to find some indication of the Sothic cycle in the design of his masterpiece, the step pyramid complex at Saqqara.
In The Egypt Code we discuss at length the design of the step pyramid complex and the intense astronomical and calendrical quality that it exhibits. Intriguing is a very curious architectural feature called a serdab that is linked to the north face of the step pyramid itself. The serdab consists of a small stone cubicle that is inclined against the slope of the lowest tier of the step pyramid at an angle of about 15 degrees and oriented about 4.5 degrees east of due north. The peculiarity of this cubicle is that inside it was a seated statue of King Djoser, which faces north and seems to look out of the cubicle through two peepholes cut into its north wall. The consensus among Egyptologists today is that the statue was meant to be gazing into the circumpolar region of the sky, where could be found the important constellation of the Big Dipper. Our calculations showed that circa 2650 BCE, when the step pyramid was constructed, the exact spot in the sky on which the gaze of the statue of Djoser seems transfixed was occupied once every twenty-four hours by the star Alkaid, the lowest star in the Big Dipper, which marked the hoof of the Bull’s Thigh asterism of the ancient Egyptians. Perhaps the reason behind this alignment was to mark the rising time of the star Sirius in the east. In other words, precisely when the hoof star Alkaid aligned itself with the direction of gaze of the statue in the north, the star Sirius would be seen rising in the east. It is interesting to consider again, as we did in chapter 4, why Imhotep chose to orient Djoser’s statue to gaze at the hoof star, Alkaid, instead of the brighter, upper thigh star Dubhe.
The tracking of the rising of Sirius with the Big Dipper would come naturally to an avid stargazer living in Egypt at the time of Imhotep, mainly because an interesting simultaneous alignment took place each day between the culmination of Sirius on the south meridian and the culmination of the brightest star in the Big Dipper, Dubhe, on the north meridian. We will recall from chapter 4 that two important stars tracked by the prehistoric stargazers of Nabta Playa were Dubhe and Sirius. Once such a conjunction is noticed, a person such as Imhotep, who was adept in geometry and astronomy, would realize very quickly that the perpetual circular trajectory of the Big Dipper around the north celestial pole could be used as a sort of dial to mark the rising, culminatio
n, and setting of the star Sirius.
The Big Dipper contains seven bright stars, with the two brightest being Dubhe and Alkaid. These stars appear to revolve around a fixed point, the north celestial pole, in one full day—in other words, they travel in a circular, counterclockwise direction, a bit like the hand of a clock moving backward for twelve hours. If we observe the specific constellations night after night, month after month, and year after year, their cycles eventually become second nature to us and become ingrained in our memory. What Imhotep could not help but notice was that when Sirius rose in the east, the star Alkaid was at about 4.5 degrees east of the meridian. The important pieces for our arugument that Imhotep had to note were (1) when the star Dubhe was at north meridian, the star Sirius was at south meridian, and (2) when the star Alkaid was about 4.5 degrees east of north (and at altitude 15 degrees—the line of sight of Djoser’s statue in the small stone cubicle at Saqqara), the star Sirius was rising in the east. If Imhotep was to have access to earlier observations such as, say, those made at Elephantine centuries before or even earlier ones made at Nabta Playa, he would have realized that the position of the star Sirius had changed due to the precession. As we saw in chapter 4, this may explain why Imhotep directed the serdab toward Alkaid rather than to Dubhe. Imhotep, as the designer of the first major architectural complex of Old Kingdom Egypt, may have been paying homage to his distant ancestors who originated this astral ritual at Nabta Playa when the hoof star Alkaid moved into place to initiate the Bull’s Thigh constellation as the circumpolar star group that would herald the rise of Sirius. Had he known of an earlier, 365-day calendar, Imhotep would also have realized that New Year’s Day had drifted from the heliacal rising of Sirius at the rate of about one day every four years and would synchronize again about every 1,460 years (every Sothic cycle). In addition, the fact that a Sothic cycle had begun in Imhotep’s lifetime or just before would certainly have induced him to commemorate this event in his great architectural design of the step pyramid complex. It should come as no surprise, then, that the number 1,460, as we will see, comes up in the design of the massive boundary wall that surrounds the step pyramid complex.
Black Genesis Page 24