The Lady of the Stars
Since the beginning of their recorded history the ancient Egyptians had performed a religious ceremony known as ‘the stretching of the cord’ to align the axis of their sacred monuments. This ceremony involved the king and a rather fetching priestess who personified the goddess Seshat. Seshat was the erudite one among the many goddesses of ancient Egypt. Some even think of her as the archetype of female librarians and civil engineers. Tall, slender and very becoming, she was adored and venerated by the royal scribes in the ‘House of Life’ (temple library), for she was among other things the patroness of sacred writing, and also the keeper of the royal annals relating to the coronations and jubilees of kings.41 She also had another, more technical role, which involved assisting the king in fixing the four corners of his future temples and pyramids and aligning them towards the stars. Oddly, however, you won’t find much written about the goddess Seshat in Egyptological textbooks. For example, Mark Lehner pays no attention to her in his recent book The Complete Pyramids, and Richard H. Wilkinson hardly mentions her in his latest book The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt.42 Other Egyptologists either choose to ignore Seshat like Lehner did,43 or mention her in the most scant of ways, as if she is but a footnote in Egyptian mythology. And even on those rare occasions when she is discussed at greater length, she is generally presented as a pretty bimbo who accompanies the king in the ‘stretching of the cord’ ritual only to give decorum and piquancy to the act. This, of course, is unfortunate; for if the truth be told about Seshat, as one Egyptologist did in the 1940s, this elusive goddess comes across not just as a pretty face in the Egyptian pantheon, by as a high-powered woman who decided on the length of the king’s reign and, according to at least one eminent Egyptologist, probably his life.44
At any rate, the goddess Seshat is always shown dressed in a leopardskin that clings to her slender body. In conformity with the fashion of the time, her dress is cut low to expose her well-rounded breasts. The yellow spots on the leopardskin are sometimes shown as stars, apparently symbolising the leopard’s and Seshat’s ability to see in the dark.45 On her head she wears a golden tiara with an antenna-like stem that has a seven-pointed star or rosette at the top. In the pantheon she is presented as the wife of Thoth, god of wisdom and inventor of the sacred hieroglyphs and of the sciences, especially astronomy. Not surprisingly, she was given an array of impressive epithets befitting this privileged relationship: ‘Foremost in the Library’, ‘Mistress of Writing in the House of Life’, ‘Keeper of the Royal Annals’ and so forth.46 Very often Seshat and Thoth are seen together recording the jubilees or coronations of kings on notched palm branches. In this capacity they are to be seen as the divine time-keepers or astronomers par excellence who recorded the annual cycle of the sky and the calendar. The French scholar Anne-Sophie Bomhard, an acclaimed authority on the ancient Egyptian calendar, expanded on this issue by saying thatThe recognition of the annual cycle and its definition, the linking of celestial phenomena to terrestrial happenings, are essential preliminaries to establishing any kind of calendar. This enterprise requires long prior observations of the sky and the stars, as well as the recording, in writing, of these observations, in order to verify them over long periods of time. It is quite natural, therefore, that the divine tutors of Time and Calendar should be Thoth, God of Science, and Seshat, Goddess of Writings and Annals.47
As one of the divine ‘tutors of Time and Calendar’ as well as the recorder of the king’s annals, Seshat was directly responsible for computing the long-range jubilees. British Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge thus pointed to a relief from the New Kingdom where the goddess is seen. . . standing before a column of hieroglyphics meaning ‘life’ and ‘power’ and ‘thirty-year festivals’ which rest upon a seated figure who holds in each hand ‘life’ and who typifies ‘millions of years’. In connection with this must be noted a passage in a text in which she declares to a king that she has inscribed on her register on his behalf a period of life which shall be ‘hundreds of thousands of Thirty-Years periods’ and has ordained that his years shall be upon the earth like the years of Ra (the sun-god) i.e. that he shall live forever.48
It is generally agreed by Egyptologists that the king’s first jubilee (or heb-sed festival, as it called by the ancients) was celebrated in the thirtieth year of his reign. But some others are of the opinion that the 30-year period was calendrical, i.e. that it fell in cycles of 30 years irrespective of the number of years the king had reigned. At any rate, it is evident from the text quoted by Budge that the term ‘thirty-year festivals’ is a euphemism for royal jubilees. Also the mention of the ‘Thirty-Years periods’ alongside the term ‘years of Ra’ should affirm to us that the computations of this period had something to do with the sun or rather its yearly cycle, and thus, by extension, the solar calendar. Such an association with the sky and Seshat’s royal duties is also evident in the ‘stretching of the cord’ ceremony, since, as we shall see, this entailed observing the motion and position of the circumpolar stars. Indeed, because of this last role Seshat was also called ‘Lady of Builders’, ‘Goddess of Construction’, ‘Founder of Architecture’ and, perhaps more aptly, ‘Lady of the Stars’. To be concise, we can think of Seshat as the royal librarian, the royal scribe, the royal astronomer, the royal architect, the royal engineer, the royal herald and perhaps even the royal adviser all rolled into one49 - a sort of Condoleeza Rice to the pharaohs.
It is well established that the ‘stretching of the cord’ ceremony was practised from at least the Second Dynasty (c. 2900 BC). As Egyptologist George Hart further explains: ‘As early as Dynasty II she (Seshat) assisted the monarch . . . in hammering boundary poles into the ground for the ceremony of “stretching the cord”. This is a crucial part of a temple foundation ritual.’50 To be precise, it is fair to say that much of the knowledge we have about the ‘stretching of the cord’ ceremony comes from very late inscriptions, mostly from the temples at Edfu and Dendera. Earlier evidence of the ceremony is found only in drawing form, without any explanatory captions. Nonetheless, as I.E.S. Edwards correctly argued:In spite of the relative late date of the inscriptions referring to the episodes of the foundation ceremonies, there is no reason to doubt that they preserved an ancient tradition. Some indication that similar ceremonies were already current in the Pyramid Age is provided by a fragmentary relief found in the Vth Dynasty sun-temple of Niuserre, which shows the king and a priestess impersonating Seshat, each holding a mallet and a stake to which a measuring cord is attached. The scene is in complete agreement with the text in the temple at Edfu which represents the king saying: ‘I take the stake and I hold the handle of the mallet. I hold the cord with Seshat’ . . .51
In the many depictions of the ceremony found all over Egypt, Seshat always faces the king and each is seen carrying a peg in one hand and a mallet in the other. A short cord is looped between the two pegs, and it is evident from this scene that the protagonists are aligning the axis of a temple or pyramid by stretching cord and aiming it at a distant object, and then fixing the alignment by hammering the two pegs into the ground. Here are some of the inscriptions from the temples at Edfu and Dendera which describe the scene:[The king says:] I hold the peg. I grasp the handle of the mallet and grip the measuring-cord with Seshat. I turn my eyes to the movements of the stars. I direct my gaze towards the bull’s thigh [meskhetiu; Plough] . . . I make firm the corners of the temple . . .52
[A priest says:] The king stretches joyously the cord, having turned his head towards the bull’s thigh and establishes the temple in the manner of ancient times.53
[The king says:] I grasp the peg and the mallet; I stretch the cord with Seshat; I observed the trajectory of the stars with my eye which is fixed on the bull’s thigh; I have been the god who indicates Time with the Merkhet instrument. I have established the four corners of the temple.54
[A priest says:] The king . . . while observing the sky and the stars, turns his sight towards the bull’s thigh . . . 55
According to Kate Spence, the ancient Egyptian surveyors had aligned the axes of the pyramids not to one star, but to the ‘simultaneous transit’ of two circumpolar stars using a simple plumb line attached to a rudimentary wooden frame and a candle for sighting at night. I have previously commented on Spence’s theory in great detail, so I do not wish to repeat the exercise here.58 But briefly, I was opposed to her ‘simultaneous transit’ for the simple reason that it required the Egyptians to aim at the stars when they were in perfect vertical alignment, which, at the most, would only be for 20 seconds or so twice a day (before their slow diurnal motion pushed them out of vertical alignment). Considering that the ancients had no optical instruments and that the operation had to be made in total darkness, in my opinion the Egyptian astronomers could not have achieved with this method the incredibly high accuracy that we see in the orientation of the Great Pyramid. In other words, Spence’s method works in theory but not in practice. At any rate, here I simply want to draw attention to one of the two stars that she claimed was targeted by the ancient surveyors: Mizar, in the Plough (the other was Kochab in the Little Bear, or Ursa Minor). Notwithstanding the validity of her proposed method, Spence did have the right constellation. It did not occur to her to question the validity of her main assumption: that the main intention of the pyramid-builders had always been to try to align their pyramids to true north as accurately as they could. To be fair to Spence, no one else questioned this assumption either. So any axis that was misaligned from true north was claimed by Spence to be due to one thing and one thing only: the slow drift of the stars caused by precession, which, she endeavoured to show with mathematical graphs, more or less matched the misalignments of the pyramids. So convinced was Spence of her theory that she, as well as many of her supporters, touted it as incontrovertible proof that the ancient Egyptians were poor astronomers because they allegedly had not noticed the effect of precession as the Greeks did many centuries later. Consequently she claimed that the high accurary of the astronomical alignment of the Great Pyramid was simply because ‘Khufu was just lucky’.59
This sort of mental gymnastics by an Egyptologist to make the facts fit a pet theory never ceases to amaze me. Anyone who has studied the Great Pyramid and has marvelled at this pristine example of ancient high-tech engineering cannot possibly conclude that luck had anything to do with the precision of its alignment. It is self-evident that the Great Pyramid was accurately aligned because its builders wanted it to be so. But there was something in Spence’s conclusion that made me ponder on the target at which the ancient surveyors had really wanted to aim their pyramid. Was it really true north that was their target, or rather the stars? Perhaps there was luck at play here, but not for Khufu. Perhaps it was true north that had been lucky because the stars happened to be there when the surveyors took their sighting. Looking at it this way, it occurred to me that, as far as I could make out, there was absolutely nothing in the Pyramid Texts or elsewhere to suggest that the direction of true north had any particular meaning to the Egyptians. On the other hand, there were an overwhelming number of statements in the Pyramid Texts confirming that the circumpolar stars were of paramount importance to the afterlife of the king. It was the stars in the north, not north itself, that were of interest to them. And even though we can agree with Spence that circumpolar stars transit true north twice each day, this only lasts for a few seconds. For the rest of the 24 hours these stars would either be seen east or west of true north. Could this be the reason, then, why most pyramids were aligned a fraction east or west of true north with the exception of the Great Pyramid? But if so, then what determined the exact time of sighting - and consequently the position of the targeted star? A clue to this last question was inadvertently given by Egyptologists Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson, who pointed out that the sightings made during the ‘stretching of the cord’ ceremony were not only towards the stars of the Plough in the north but also sometimes towards the stars of Orion in the south.60 Naturally this statement immediately caught my attention, for I, of all people, am aware that Orion had a very special role in the sky-religion of the pyramid-builders.61 Suddenly I realised that the answer had been staring me in the face. I knew why the Great Pyramid was so perfectly oriented towards true north, and what was more, I had a strong feeling that the same reason ought also to apply to the significant ‘misalignment’ of the Step Pyramid.62
Orion and Me
To say that I have had a special interest in Orion and the Great Pyramid would surely be a gross understatement. But also, to be perfectly truthful, I only developed this interest rather late in life, when I was in my mid-thirties. When I left my native Egypt and headed for England in 1967, I was only 19 years old. Not even in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that one day I would write a bestseller about Orion and the Great Pyramid. Indeed, after qualifying in 1973 at the University of the South Bank in London, I pursued a career in building contracting in the Middle East and Africa, oblivious of any studies on astronomy and the Great Pyramid. It was while working in Saudi Arabia that I made a startling and unexpected connection between Orion and the Giza Pyramids that was to change the course of my life. One night, while looking at the three stars of Orion’s belt in the clear desert night sky, it struck me that these stars had exactly the same layout and positioning to the Milky Way as the layout of the three pyramids of Giza and their positioning relative to the Nile.
I became intrigued by this uncanny correlation, the more so because I found out that the kings of the Pyramid Age saw the region of Orion as being part of the celestial afterworld they called the Duat.63 I also discovered that in 1964 two academics at UCLA had worked out that a shaft within the Great Pyramid had pointed towards Orion’s belt in c. 2500 BC, when this pyramid was built. It took me 12 years to compile my research in a book, which was published in London in 1994. Backed by a BBC documentary, the book took off and shot to number 1 in the bestseller lists.64 One particular point that I made in 1994 relevant to the present discussion was this: with the use of two illustrations showing the Plough and Orion, I demonstrated how the lower meridian transit of the Plough took place in the north at exactly the same time as the rising of Orion’s belt in the east. My conclusion was that the ancient surveyors had aimed the Great Pyramid at a star in the Plough not because it was at true north (although it did happen to be there at the time) but because it could be used as a time-marker to tell them precisely when Orion’s belt would be rising in the east. Their true focus of interest was not the northern sky per se, but the mechanism of the circumpolar stars as indicators of the rising of Orion’s belt in the east. In other words, it was Orion’s belt rising in the east that was their ultimate objective in aiming the pyramid at the star Kochab or Mizar (or both, as Spence has theorised) during their transit in the north. Thus the tiny misalignment that is registered in the orientation of the Great Pyramid was not, as Spence believed, due to the vertical misalignment of these two northern stars at ‘simultaneous transit’ but rather due to the fact that this was the orientation the priests wanted the structure to have in order for it be locked for ever in a time-frame (c. 2500 BC) when Orion’s belt was rising (i.e. being ‘reborn’) in the east. In this way the Great Pyramid was tied ad infinitum to the date of Khufu’s ‘rebirth’, i.e. as an Osiris-Orion entity, by means of the mechanism of the stars. I now had a strong feeling that this reasoning would also prove correct for the ‘misalignment’ of the Step P
yramid at Saqqara. In other words, was the rising of a star in the east the reason for the 4° 35′ ‘misalignment’ of the Step Pyramid at the attached serdab?
The Step Pyramid, as we have already seen, is generally dated to c. 2650 BC, although most researchers will allow for a margin of uncertainty of 150 years either way. I had the orientation of the Step Pyramid from Dorner’s data. What I now needed was the exact angle of inclination of the serdab, and with this data I could work out which star in the Plough it was aimed at. In his latest book on the pyramids, Mark Lehner had stated that the serdab was tilted upwards by 13° towards the northern sky.65 Normally I would accept such a statement at face value, but I soon discovered that there was much confusion regarding the angle of tilt of the serdab. Jean-Philippe Lauer, deemed by many to be the supreme authority on the Step Pyramid, gives a much higher value than Lehner. In Lauer’s own words: ‘Two round holes drilled in the north face of the serdab, whose sides are inclined parallel to that of the Pyramid, allowed the statue to communicate with the outside world . . .66 The slope of its faces is near 16° to the vertical . . .’67 This same value of nearly 16° is given by Sir I.E.S. Edwards, another renowned expert on the pyramids. To complicate things further, the eminent French Egyptologist Jacques Vandier gives a value of 17°68. I realised that the only way to be sure was to measure the angle of tilt myself. The opportunity came along in July 2002. After several trials using a simple inclinometer with a plumb line and also a spirit level with a large protractor, I concluded that the angle of tilt was, in fact, very near 16°, as Lauer and Edwards had affirmed.69
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