These ‘explicitly stellar’ names given to pyramids carry a clear and straightforward message: pyramids on the ground are to be regarded as ‘stars’. If this was true, then the implications were astounding, and a whole new rethink of what motivated the ancient Egyptians to build pyramids was required. This was precisely what I had done, starting in 1983, at the Giza pyramids. I knew that now I was about to do the same again for the Step Pyramid complex at Saqqara. For I very much suspected that the ‘star’ that the Step Pyramid represented on earth was no ordinary star, but one that was deemed vital to the welfare of Egypt; a star, no less, that was imagined to completely control, as the Hermetic texts said, ‘all things on earth’.
Plough, Dipper or Thigh: It’s all in the Bear
The Plough is not, strictly speaking, a constellation. Some astronomers will insist on calling it an asterism because its seven bright stars are part of the larger constellation we call the Great Bear or Ursa Major. But to any casual observer it is only those seven stars and not the whole of the Great Bear constellation which stand out, with their distinct pattern of a plough or dipper. This often causes many people to erroneously use the name Great Bear when they in fact really mean Plough. This, most annoyingly, is especially true of Egyptologists, which has caused much confusion all round. At any rate the ancient Egyptians, like most people, perceived only the pattern of the seven bright stars, which they likened not to a plough but to a bull’s thigh. This is the constellation they called meskhetiu, and it figured prominently in their religious texts and funerary drawings in connection with the afterlife destiny of kings and nobles. It was one of three distinct constellations, along with Ursa Minor (the Little Bear) and Draconis (the Dragon), that, in ancient times, revolved perpetually around the north pole of the sky like a wheel. The stars in these constellations were known as the ikhemu-set, which means ‘the Imperishable Ones’ or ‘the Indestructible Ones,’22 and are known to modern astronomers as the circumpolar stars because they perpetually circumnavigate the north celestial pole, making them the perfect metaphor for ‘eternal life’, due to the fact that they never set but are always visible in the night sky. As early as 1912 the influential American Egyptologist James H. Breasted was to write that, ‘it is especially those (stars) which are called “the Imperishable Ones” in which the Egyptians saw the host of the dead. These are said to be in the north of the sky, and the suggestion that the circumpolar stars, which never set or disappear, are the ones which are meant is a very probable one.’23
Today Breasted’s views are universally accepted. Indeed, the British Egyptologist R.T. Rundle Clark drove the same point even further by asserting that ‘no other ancient people were so deeply affected by the eternal circuit of the stars around a point in the northern sky. Here must be the node of the universe, the centre of regulation.’24 In the same vein, the archaeoastronomer E.C. Krupp, an accredited specialist in this field, also pointed out that the Egyptians associated the Plough ‘with eternal life because its stars are circumpolar. They were the undying, imperishable stars. In death the king ascended to their circumpolar realm, and there he preserved the cosmic order.’25 The idea that the king preserved the ‘cosmic order’ or harmony of the universe by making use of the circumpolar stars as ‘the centre of regulation’ is most intriguing, because it may indeed explain the cosmic function of the ka statue in the serdab and why its gaze is eternally locked on these stars. Actually, the cosmic order that Krupp was alluding to was called Maat by the ancient Egyptians. Maat was their most fundamental and important religious tenet, and was portrayed as a seated goddess wearing an ostrich feather - the ‘feather of truth’ - on her head. The pharaohs were often shown presenting a small figure of Maat to the gods, the supreme gesture of piety and respect, and they often adopted the epithet ‘Beloved of Maat’. The goddess Maat figured prominently in the so-called Judgement Scene where the souls of the dead were weighed against the feather of truth. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the whole religious edifice upon which the pharaonic theocracy rested was Maat.
Although Egyptologists generally define it as ‘truth, justice and balance’, a closer examination shows that Maat was also intrinsically linked to the harmony and order of the cosmos, which principally entailed the stately motion of stars and their relation to the cycle of nature. As Egyptologists Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson further explain:On a cosmic scale, Maat also represented the divine order of the universe as originally brought into being at the moment of Creation. It was the power of Maat that was believed to regulate the seasons, the movement of the stars and the relation between men and god. The concept was therefore central both to the Egyptians’ ideas about the universe and to their code of ethics.26
Kingship belonged much more with the overall role of the king in imposing order and preventing chaos. The function of the king as the representative of the gods was to preserve the original harmony of the universe, therefore a great deal of the iconography in Egyptian temples, tombs and palaces was concerned much more with this overall aim than with the individual circumstances of the ruler at any particular point in time.27
From these definitions it is self-evident that the Egyptians believed in a heavenly force or power that regulated the movements of the constellations in the sky and the changing of the seasons on earth, and that somehow the king could control this power. Attached to this belief was also the notion that there had been a time when sky and earth were one and in perfect harmony. In the so-called Heliopolitan creation myth, the sky-goddess Nut and the earth-god Geb were at first locked in a tight embrace and the fruit of their amorous union were the twin souls and archetypal lovers Osiris and Isis, who became the first divine king and queen of Egypt and bore the first Horus-king. But then Nut ‘swallowed’ her children to make them ‘stars’ in her body. Because of this act of infanticide she suffered the eternal punishment of being separated from her husband by the hand of her father Shu, the air-god.28 But now sky and earth were out of synch. No more did the cycle of the stars in the sky perfectly match that of nature on earth. For the Egyptians, whose very survival relied entirely on the regularity of the Nile’s flood, this presented a serious problem. As we shall see in the next chapter, the annual flood had to be predictable and ‘good’, otherwise calamity befell the land and its people. And so from this constant fear was spawned the belief that the cosmic order of the sky, which was perfect and could be relied on to the nearest minute, could be brought down to earth through the magical power of rituals. Only by the stringent adherence to Maat could the pharaoh ensure the welfare of Egypt and the regulated and orderly flooding of the Nile.
The goddess Nut (the sky)
There exist ancient Egyptian teachings dating from the first century known as the Corpus Hermeticum, which, as we have briefly mentioned earlier, express the fundamentals of this belief system which saw a connection or ‘influence’ between the cycle of the stars and that of men and all things on earth:God arranged the Zodiac [the twelve seasonal constellations] in accord with the cycles of nature . . . (and) . . . devised a secret engine (‘viz. the system of the stars’) linked to unerring and inevitable fate, to which all things in men’s lives, from their birth to their final destruction shall of necessity be brought into subjection; and all other things on earth likewise shall be controlled by the working of this engine . . .29
Mulling over this archaic perception of the visible world, I knew that I was trying to somehow get into the mindset of the ancient Egyptians. I had to stop thinking as scientific man and begin thinking like cosmic man. I had to bring myself to believe, like they did, that the constellations were the wheel of a cosmic engine that could influence events on earth. I had to believe, like they did, that the king and his ka could control the working of this cosmic engine. Finally I had to believe, like they did, that the Step Pyramid complex was not a cemetery as such but a ‘centre of regulation’ from which the king could control the cosmos. It was, I knew, the only way to truly understand the ancient Egyptian
s and their legacy of pyramids and temples.
Another inscription from Rawer’s serdab provided a further missing piece from this strange and elaborate puzzle. According to Blackman there was, just above the squint on the north face of the serdab, a line of hieroglyphs that simply stated: ‘the eyes of the kahouse’. 30 But the term ‘ka-house’, according to Egyptologists, referred not to the serdab alone but to the whole mastaba complex to which it was attached. This, of course, implied that the two peepholes on the north face of Djoser’s serdab were also regarded as the ‘eyes’ of the whole Step Pyramid complex. From my previous studies I was aware that pyramids were not only thought of as stars on earth but also as being the pharaoh himself. In the Pyramid Texts there are numerous claims that the soul, or ba, of a dead king became a ‘star’.31 Also, as Richard Wilkinson further pointed out, ‘Nut (the sky-goddess) also became inextricably associated with the concept of resurrection in Egyptian funerary beliefs, and the dead were believed to become stars in the body of the goddess.’32
This intriguing stellar connection of the king and his pyramid is made even more evident by a series of inscriptions and engravings found on the capstone (pyramidion) of a royal pyramid from Dashour that belonged to a Twelfth Dynasty pharaoh, Amenemhet III. On the east side of the pyramidion are engraved two large ‘eyes’ and a line of hieroglyphs that read: ‘May the face of the king be opened so that he may see the Lord of the Horizon when he crosses the sky; may he cause the king to shine as a god, lord of eternity and indestructible.’33 The name of the pyramid that bore this capstone was ‘Amenemhet is beautiful’, which, not surprisingly, meant to Egyptologist Mark Lehner that ‘Like the names of the pyramids . . . the eyes (on the pyramidion) tells us that the pyramids were personifications of the dead kings who were buried within them.’34 The American Egyptologist Alexander Piankoff, well known for his translation of the Pyramid Texts of Unas (a Fifth Dynasty king who built a pyramid at Saqqara), also wrote that ‘the embalmed body of the king lay in or under the pyramid, which together with its entire compound, was considered his body. The pyramids were personified . . .’ In addition Piankoff also showed the personification of the king’s pyramid with the title that queens of the Sixth Dynasty adopted. As an example he gives the title of King Unas’s daughter as being ‘the royal daughter of the body of “Perfect are the places of Unas”’, the latter epithet being the name of Unas’s pyramid. According to Piankoff, the dead king rested in or under his pyramid ‘as Osiris in the Netherworld, and received his sustenance through an elaborate ritual’.35
There are several pyramids, as we have already seen, that bore unequivocal stellar names, such as ‘Djedefre is a sehedu star’, ‘Horus is the Star at the Head of the Sky’ and ‘Nebka is a Star’. We have also seen how Alexander Badawy argued that other pyramids which were identified with the king’s ba, or soul, must be taken as stellar since the ba becomes a star in the firmament. By simple transposition, if A equals B, and B equals C, then A must equal C. In other words, if the king becomes a star in the sky and he also becomes his pyramid in the Memphite necropolis, it must follow that his star is also to be regarded as his pyramid and vice versa. This would certainly indicate that certain clusters of pyramids such as those of Giza and Abusir may represent clusters of stars, i.e. constellations. Let us leave this intriguing possibility for a moment, however, and return to the two peepholes of Djoser’s serdab.
Looking deeper into this issue of Djoser’s serdab, I was pleased to find that there were many eminent scholars who had also independently arrived at more or less the same conclusion as I had regarding the stellar function of the two peepholes. For example, the French Egyptologist Christiane Ziegler concluded that ‘through the two peep-holes the king would gaze towards the “imperishable” stars near the North Pole’.36 Although Ziegler did not venture why this was a necessary feature of the complex, she nonetheless recognised that the peepholes had a stellar function. She was echoed by Mark Lehner, who wrote thatOn the northern side of his Saqqara Step Pyramid Djoser emerges from his tomb in statue form, into a statue-box, or Serdab, which has just such a pair of peepholes to allow him to see out37 . . . with eyes once inlaid with rock crystal, Djoser’s statue gazes out through peepholes in the serdab box, tilted upwards 13° to the northern sky where the king joined the circumpolar stars . . .38
To support such a conclusion, Lehner quoted a passage from the Book of the Dead in which the dead person is made to say: ‘Open for me are the double doors of the sky, open for me are the double doors of the earth. Open for me are the bolts of Geb, exposed for me are the roof . . . and the Twin Peepholes.’ In addition to Ziegler’s and Lehner’s conclusions renowned Russian astronomer Professor Alexander Gurshtein wrote that ‘On the north side of Imhotep’s Step Pyramid there is a small stone cubicle canted towards the north, with a pair of tiny holes in its façade likely for astronomical observations by the dead pharaoh.’39
In my experience with such things, it is an excellent sign when several researchers come to the same conclusion on the same issue, because the likelihood is that they are on the right track. Indeed, it had to be admitted that the evidence for a stellar function for the serdab was overwhelming, textually, astronomically and architecturally. It now remained to work out which specific star in the northern sky was targeted by the peepholes.
And why.
X Marks the Spot
To see Djoser’s serdab one has to walk past the east side of the Step Pyramid and then turn left at the far corner. From here one can already get a side view of the serdab and even a glimpse at the ka statue through a small glassed window on the upper part of its side. Once you stand in front of the serdab, you will immediately see the peepholes.
By leaning back against the north wall and fixing your eyes at the place in the sky where the peepholes are directed, you can mentally project an ‘X’ to mark the spot. And even though it will be broad daylight, it is not too hard to imagine how the Plough constellation would sweep over the X during its diurnal cycle. Now if the angle of inclination of the serdab and its azimuth could be known with a good degree of accuracy, it would be a relatively easy excercise to calculate which one of the Plough’s seven bright stars would superimpose on the X at the time the serdab was built, c. 2650 BC. Normally such data should be relatively easy to obtain in Egyptological manuals or publications. As it turned out, however, it proved to be a far more complicated matter than I had anticipated.
Finding the azimuth or orientation of the serdab’s north face was the least troublesome task. All I needed was the azimuth of the north face of the Step Pyramid to which the serdab was attached. I was aware that the latest study undertaken on the astronomical orientation of Egyptian pyramids was by the German Egyptologist Josef Dorner in the early 1980s. Unfortunately Dorner did not publish his data but simply lodged it in thesis format at the University of Innsbruck. Fortuitously, the Italian astronomer Giulio Magli, of the Politecnico di Milano, whom I know very well, had managed to obtain a copy of Dorner’s thesis and was happy to pass me the data on the Step Pyramid that I needed. I found out that, according to Dorner, the sides of the Step Pyramid ‘do not exactly face the cardinal points, the northern front being 4°35′ east of true north’.40 Dorner - and other Egyptologists - tend to attribute this rather large deviation from true north to either carelessness or inefficiency on the part of the ancient surveyors. On closer scrutiny, however, this explanation does not hold water. It was well known, for example, that the Egyptians of the Pyramid Age were more than capable of orienting pyramids to much higher levels of accuracy than this. The Giza pyramids are, of course, a prime example of this, with alignments within the 20 arc minute level of accuracy. The Great Pyramid, in point of fact, is accurate within an astounding 3 arc minutes from true north (0.05°), which is almost 100 times more accurate than the 275 arc minutes (4° 35′) for the Step Pyramid! Yet there is no good reason to suppose that the surveyors of the Step Pyramid were either less efficient or did not have the same sighting dev
ices and methodologies that their immediate successors had. Indeed, mastabas that were built before the Step Pyramid were aligned well within the 1° level of accuracy. Furthermore, any practising surveyor will confirm that an error might be considered if the deviation was no more than 1°, but a deviation of 4° 35′ is far too large to be assumed a mere mistake. Even the most inexperienced surveyor using the most rudimentary of sighting instruments would not make such a slip-up, unless he deliberately wanted to. There are only two realistic explanations for this large deviation: either the surveyors were not interested in true north, or, more likely in my view, they were aiming at something else in the sky that was at 4° 35′ east from true north. My gut feeling was that the second explanation was probably the right one. Experience had shown time and time again that nothing the pyramid builders did was left to chance.
It was at this point that I could have kicked myself for not remembering earlier a very important and very ancient ceremony related to the astronomical orientation of pyramids and temples. With mounting excitement I realised that the missing piece of this puzzle might well be in the hands of a very unusual and very well-groomed lady surveyor.
The Egypt Code Page 4