Reconstruction
Using the powerful astronomy programme StarryNight Pro v.4 (and Skymap Pro7 as a back-up) I punched in the latitude of the Step Pyramid: 29° 49′ N and 31° 15′ E. I then entered the date of 2650 BC. Within a few seconds I was looking at the ancient sky above the ‘newly built’ Step Pyramid. I then looked at the northern part of the sky and placed the cursor at azimuth 4° 35′ and then at 16° above the horizon line. I was now looking at the spot at which the ka statue in the serdab was gazing so intently. I then activated the sky at ×300 speed and waited. After several observations of the lower transits of the Plough, I was fairly sure that the star in question was Al Kaid, the ‘hoof’ star of meskhetiu, the bull’s thigh.70 Trying a variety of dates within the +/- 150 years ranges, I was also relatively certain that the observation had been made near the date of 2800 BC. I now ‘froze’ the sky at this date and the precise moment Al Kaid aligned with the serdab, and directed my screen view to the east. There it was, shining brighter than anything else in the horizon: the star of Horus was Sirius!
I suddenly remembered that the architect Imhotep, who had been responsible for the design of the Step Pyramid complex and, presumably, its astronomical alignments, had also been a high priest of Heliopolis. It was well known that Heliopolis was where regular observations of Sirius had been made since the beginning of Egyptian civilisation and that it was because of the timely rising of this star that the calendar had been invented at Heliopolis in around 2800 BC - the same date that was now highlighted on my computer screen. And although Heliopolis, it is true, was dedicated to the sun-god Ra, nonetheless, 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.71
Did Imhotep study the various cycles of Sirius, ‘the star at the head’ of all the other stars in the sky? And did he incorporate these cycles into the overall design of the Step Pyramid complex?
To what end?
CHAPTER TWO
The Quest for Eternity
The Nile and its flooding were dominant factors in the newly formed
Egyptian state . . .
Jaromir Malek and John Baines, The Cultural Atlas of the World:
Ancient Egypt
The importance of Sirius for the 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 which marked the beginning of the agricultural year . . .
R.H. Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt
The Egyptian year was considered to begin on 19 July (according to the later Julian calendar) which was the date of the heliacal rising of the dog star Sirius . . .
Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson, The British Museum Dictionary of
Ancient Egypt
The Egyptians . . . were the first to discover the solar year, and to portion out its course into twelve parts. They obtained this knowledge from the stars.
Herodotus, The Histories, Book II
A Sense of Eternity
‘The quest for Eternity,’ wrote the French scholar Anne-Sophie Bomhard, ‘was the most essential preoccupation of the Egyptian civilisation.’1 This is a bit of an understatement. The quest for eternity was the raison d’être of the Egyptian civilisation. Everything they did, every monument they built, every ceremony, every ritual, every writing was directly or indirectly inspired by the idea of eternity and how to connect with it. And if one needs reminding, then all one has to do is look at the pyramids of Giza.2 Nothing else can really explain their brooding presence. But if the pyramids are symbols to eternity, then its very manifestation must surely be the never-ending flow of the River Nile and, perhaps even more so, its cyclical flood. The fifth century BC historian Herodotus called Egypt ‘the gift of the Nile’. The Egyptians themselves went a lot further. They claimed that their sacred river had its source in heaven among the stars.3 As the distinguished French Egyptologist Jean Kerisel so aptly put it, ‘the mystery of the distant sources of the Nile and the inability to explain the mechanism behind the flooding of the river which followed a regular calendar . . . must have nourished the image of divinity and the sense of eternity’.4
The source of the Nile lies in the distant south, 4,000 kilometres into the heartland of Africa. But the ancient Egyptians never knew this. Indeed, the whereabouts of the source of the Nile - and thus the cause of the yearly flood - was not known to modern man until the late nineteenth century. It was towards this mysterious distant south, therefore, that the ancient Egyptians directed their attention, watching and waiting for the life-giving flood to come each year. As the British astronomer Allan Chapman explained, the Nile ‘ran very largely from south to north, almost down the meridian, so that when one looked south, astronomical bodies always rose to the left from the desert, culminated to the meridian above the Nile, and set to the right beyond the western desert.’5 Similar views are expressed by the American Egyptologist John A. Wilson who wrote that. . . (the Egyptian) took his orientation from the Nile River, the source of all life. He faced the south, from which the stream came. One of the terms for ‘south’ is also the term for ‘face’; the usual word for ‘north’ is probably related to a word which means ‘the back of the face’. On his left was the east and on his right the west. The word for ‘east’ and ‘left’ is the same and the word for ‘west’ and ‘right’ is the same.6
In ancient Egypt the Nile was sacred, represented as a god with drooping breasts and a belly gorged with food and drink. The Egyptians believed with intense fervour that the Nile had its source not on earth but in some deep cavernous region of the underworld. Yet the underworld itself, as many of the ancient texts imply, was an interface with the world of the stars. It was called the Duat, and as many Egyptologists have demonstrated, there was an underworld Duat as well as a starry Duat. For example, J. Gwyn Griffiths informs us that ‘Osiris is especially associated with the Duat, a watery celestial region where he consorts with Orion and Sothis (Sirius), heralds of inundation and fertility. He is also Lord of Eternity . . .’7 And Mark Lehner writes that ‘the word for “Netherworld” was Duat, often written with a star in a circle, a reference to Orion, the stellar expression of Osiris in the underworld. Osiris was the Lord of the Duat, which, like the celestial world (and the real Nile Valley) was both a water world and an earthly realm.’8 But the celestial Duat and the underworld Duat were probably one and the same thing to the Egyptians. This can be explained by the observation that stars set (enter the underworld) in the western horizon each day and emerge twelve hours later in the east. In other words, they journey for half the day in the underworld and the other half in the sky above. But to the Egyptians the Nile not only had its source in the starry Duat, its yearly cycle of the flood mirrored the cycle of the stars. There was, however, a more visible feature in the sky that added to this earth-sky correlation: ‘Was not the life-giving Nile itself,’ points out the astronomer Alan Chapman, ‘reflected in the very heavens themselves, in the form of the Milky Way?’9 Speaking of the ‘celestial world and underworld’, Mark Lehner wrote:Indeed, the sky had banks or levees on the west and in the east. The Milky Way was the ‘beaten path of the stars’, although it was also a watery way. Two fields were prominent in the sky, the Field of Reeds, a rather marshy area on the eastern edge, and the Field of Offerings further north near the Imperishable Ones. In fact, the vision is that of the Nile Valley at inundation.10
There can be little doubt that to the ancient Egyptians the shimmering white band of starry light we call the Milky Way was the celestial Nile on which the gods navigated. ‘If Egypt is a reflection of the sky,’ wrote the mythologist Lucy Lamie, ‘then divine beings sail on the waters of t
he Great River which animate the cosmos: the Milky Way’.11
The Flood
Each year the great river would begin to swell in June and eventually overflow its banks and flood the adjacent land. This was a phenomenon that completely mystified the Egyptians. They had absolutely no idea why the Nile should do that and were the more bewildered because the flood came not in the rainy season, as might be expected, but in the height of summer when the weather was at its driest. As Herodotus noted when he visited Egypt in c. 450 BC:About why the Nile behaves precisely as it does I could get no information from the priests nor yet from anyone else. What I particularly wished to know is why the water begins to rise at the summer solstice, continues to do so for a hundred days, and then falls again at the end of that period, so that it remains low throughout the winter until the summer solstice comes round again in the following year.12
For a people living in a climate where the sun shone nearly throughout the year, and who were thus accustomed to seeing sunrise each morning and sunset each evening, it was inevitable that they would eventually notice that the yearly cycle of the flood seemed to be in synch with the yearly cycle of the sky. It would have become quickly obvious to them that when the sun reached its most northerly position on the horizon (at the summer solstice), the Nile would begin to swell. They also noticed that preceding the summer solstice sunrise certain constellations would always be seen dominating the eastern horizon. All this prompted them to carefully count and record the number of days between each cycle. It would have taken but a few years to convince them that the cycle was 365 days long. It would also have been entirely natural for them to consider the summer solstice as the first day of the new year and call it, aptly, the Birth of Ra.13 This is because many celestial and terrestrial events that happened at this time of year evoked the idea of a beginning or a birth. For, as we have already seen in the Introduction, was not the Nile reborn at the summer solstice, and along with it the whole of Egypt? And did not Ra himself emerge from his journey through the Duat, the world of the dead, when he reached the summer solstice, as we have also seen in the Introduction?
The various astronomical cycles known to the Ancient Egyptians
The East and Dawn
‘The ancient Egyptians were past masters of observing nature,’ wrote Anne-Sophie Bomhard.14 They carefully observed nature, its creatures, its vegetation and its cycles. Nothing fascinated them more, however, than the observation of the celestial bodies. From earliest times they meticulously observed and recorded the rising of the sun and the stars in the east, which they called ‘the place where the gods were born’.15
An observer looking at sunrise from the same vantage point will quickly become aware that the sun changes position along the eastern horizon throughout the year and will alternate between two extreme points: the summer solstice north of east, and the winter solstice south of east. At these two extreme points the sun appears to be stationary for a week or so, hence the term ‘solstice’ (from the Latin, meaning ‘stationary sun’). In our modern Gregorian calendar the summer solstice falls on 21 June and the winter solstice on 21 December. Counting the days between two summer solstices will give 365 days, which we call the ‘year’. Most historians of science agree that this discovery was first made in Egypt, probably in the fourth millennium BC. It was most probably around 2800 BC that a 365-day solar calendar was put into practice by the priests of the Great Sun Temple at Heliopolis.
The exact solar (tropical) year is 365.2422 days long (although the extra 0.2422 day is assumed to be 0.25, i.e. an exact quarter-day, for calendrical purposes). So to keep our modern Gregorian calendar in synch with the seasons, we add one day every four years to the month of February. This special year is called a leap year. The Egyptians, however, did not have a leap year. They simply let their calendar drift out of synch with the seasons. As the eminent British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie explains:We are all familiar with the leap year, when we put an extra day in the calendar to keep the account true. The whole checking of the chronology rests on the unquestioned fact that the Egyptians ignored the leap year, and counted only 365 days . . . Now the Egyptian slipped his months backward a quarter of a day each year, by not keeping up the enumeration as we do with a 29th of February. As the months thus slipped backward, or the seasons appeared to slip forward in the calendar, in 1460 years the [calendar] months shifted round all the seasons.16
This ‘unquestioned fact’ that the ancient Egyptians ignored the leap year meant that a cycle was created of 1,460 years which can be seen as a Great Year. The value of 1,460 years is obtained by simply dividing 365 by 0.25. And although it is this value that is given by Petrie and also quoted by modern Egyptologists for the resynch of the calendar with the seasons, they are all assuming a yearly drift of the calendar of 0.25 days, which, of course, is not the case precisely. The true rate of drift is 0.2422 days, which gives us 1506 years (365 divided by 0.2422), which can be seen as a Great Solar Cycle. Actually the value of 1,460 years quoted by Petrie is not the resynch of the calendar with the seasons but rather with the heliacal rising of Sirius, an event which was called by the Egyptians wp rnpt, meaning ‘opener of the year’17 (see below). The heliacal rising - or first dawn - rising of Sirius had two peculiarities which the Egyptians were quick to notice: first, it took place near the summer solstice, which also happened to be the start of the flood season; and second, it drifted forward by exactly one day every four years with respect to the calendar.18 And although the ancient Egyptians were fully aware of this drift of the calendar, they made no attempt to correct it by having a leap year. This non-adjustment policy had immense repercussions on the way the Egyptians perceived time and the order of the universe. For although it is nearly certain that at one time in their past they had considered the heliacal rising of Sirius as being the first day of their calendar, and indeed called this event the ‘opener of the year’ throughout their 3,000-year history, they nonetheless obstinately refused to have a leap year. The question begs the asking: why such obstinacy? Why didn’t they simply add an extra day every four years to keep the calendar in synch with the heliacal rising of Sirius?
The answer, as we shall now see, lies in the simple fact that the ancient Egyptians did not compute their calendar in a linear manner starting from some event (such as the birth of Christ) and moving towards infinity, but in a cycle that always returned to its point of origin. In other words, to the Egyptians time was not linear but cyclical.
Year Zero: The Great Return
Our Western Christian culture has fixed ‘year zero’ of our calendar with the birth of Jesus, which is assumed to have happened 2,005 years ago (as I am writing this).
When was the ‘year zero’ of the ancient Egyptians?
Before we look into this, I first want to dispense with a misnomer regarding the Egyptian calendar. Modern Egyptologists call the ancient Egyptian calendar the ‘civil calendar’, which, annoyingly, gives the impression that the ancient Egyptians were essentially dull civil servants who devised a calendar fixing work and feast days and for levying taxes on livestock and suchlike tedious municipal and administrative tasks. This, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. For one, the term civil calendar is not from the ancient Egyptians but comes from the more pedestrian Romans. It first appeared in the third century AD in a book titled Die Natali by the Roman chronicler Censorinus who prosaically wrote that ‘their (the Egyptians’) complete civil year has 365 days without a single intercalary day’.19 But the truth is that the Egyptian calendar was predominantly religious and was thought of as some kind of cosmic instrument with which the cosmic order could be regulated on earth. The Egyptian calendar was not civil but divine. I shall, however, reluctantly stick to the term ‘civil calendar’ to avoid confusion.
The civil calendar was divided in the following manner: 12 months of 30 days, with each month having three weeks or ‘decades’ of 10 days. The 12 months amounted to 360 days, to which were then added five days known as the Epagomenal
Days or ‘Five Days upon the Year’, thus making up the full 365-day year. The Egyptian year had only three seasons of four months each. These were: First Season, called Akhet, meaning inundation, from months I to IV; Second Season called Peret or Proyet, meaning emergence or coming forth, from months V to VIII; Third Season, called Shemu, meaning harvest, from months IX to XII. Originally the months were not given names but only numbers from one to twelve. The first day of the first month of the First Season was known as I Akhet 1, i.e. month I, season Akhet, day 1. Later in the New Kingdom the months received official names: I Thoth, II Phaopi, III Athyr, IV Choiak, V Tybi, VI Mechir, VII Phamenoth, VIII Pharmuti, IX Pachons, X Payni, XI Epiphi and XII Mesore.20 Egyptologists and historians can never agree how old the Egyptian calendar is. There is, however, much evidence to support the conclusion that it was already in place during the Old Kingdom, for in the Pyramid Texts there are several passages that allude to it indirectly:Osiris appears, the sceptre is pure, the Lord of Right is exalted at the First of the Year . . . The Lord of wine in flood, his season has recognised him . . . The sky has conceived him, the dawn has reborn him, and this king is conceived with him in the sky, this king is reborn with him in the sky . . . the king has gone up from the east of the sky . . . 21
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