But not everyone agrees with this. For example, the historian David E. Duncan, in his popular book The Calendar, ventures that the Egyptian calendar could be ‘as early as 4241 BC’.48 And the Oxford astronomer Allan Chapman seems confident when he asserts that ‘from perhaps as early as 4500 BC, the Egyptians had noticed that just as the Nile was about to flood in early June, the star . . . (Sirius) rose just before the sun’.49 Similar views were also held by the late German chronologist Eduard Meyer and the Welsh historian J.E. Machip-White, both of whom boldly fixed the invention of the Egyptian civil calendar to 4241 BC.50 The issue of the origin of the Egyptian civil calendar, therefore, remain an open one. But I feel that it is safe to assume that although the Egyptians probably did observe and record the movement of the celestial bodies as early as - and perhaps even earlier than - 4241 BC, it was not till 2781 BC that they decided to formally adopt the calendar as an official time-keeping instrument for fixing religious festivals and events. There is much to suggest that it was the conjunction of the summer solstice sunrise and the heliacal rising of Sirius in 2781 BC that prompted this decision. Bearing this in mind, the astronomer E.C. Krupp makes a very interesting comment that provides a clue as to how the ancient sun-priests of Heliopolis may have interpreted the heliacal rising of Sirius: ‘The world began in earnest there (at Heliopolis) when Sirius, the stellar signal for the Nile Flood, in its first return to the predawn sky, alighted as the bennu, the bird of creation, upon the benben and then took wings as the sun followed it into the heaven to bring light, life, and order to the cosmos.’51
The bennu or ‘bird of creation’ which Krupp is alluding to was the Egyptian phoenix. There was a ‘temple of the phoenix’ at Heliopolis which is mentioned in the Pyramid Texts.52 According to legend the phoenix returned to Heliopolis in long cycles of time to usher in a new calendrical age. Could there be a link, therefore, between the return of the phoenix to Heliopolis and the return of the heliacal rising of Sirius when 1 Thoth (New Year’s Day) resynchronised in cycles of 1,460 years? Krupp certainly seems to imply this. The temple of Heliopolis was, after all, the centre of time-keeping and calendrics, and it is known with certainty that it was especially at Heliopolis that the heliacal rising of Sirius, which the astronomer Anthony J. Spalinger calls ‘the ideal New Year’s Day’,53 was celebrated. There is, in fact, a statement made by the first-century Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus which suggests that the return of the Egyptian phoenix to Heliopolis was none other than the ‘ideal New Year’s Day’ of the star Sirius which took place every 1,460 years:54 the bird called the phoenix, after a long succession of ages, appeared in Egypt and furnished the most learned men of that country and of Greece with abundant matter for the discussion of the marvellous phenomenon . . . it is a creature sacred to the sun, differing from all other birds in its beak and in the tints of its plumage, is held unanimously by those who have described its nature . . . Some maintain that it is seen at intervals of 1,461years, and that the former birds flew into the city called Heliopolis . . .55
Commenting on Tacitus’s statement, the Egyptologist Stephen Quirke, curator at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London, wrote thus:Intriguingly, the Roman author Tacitus refers to a cycle of 1,461 years, which is four times 365 and a quarter. This number carried hidden significance for Egypt, where the ancient calendar rounded off the actual solar year. The earth in fact takes 365 and a quarter days to go around the sun, but the round number has advantages for accountancy, and the Egyptians did not feel the need to add a day in the manner of our leap year. Every 1,461 years the New Year of the Egyptian calendar would coincide again with the ‘real’ New Year of the solar, and so of the agricultural calendar. This suggests a Nilotic origin for the phoenix at least in the version recorded by Tacitus.56
We should also note that the 1,460-1 years, or Sothic cycle, was sometimes called the Great Year. Bearing this in mind, there is a commentary by Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79) on Manilus that affirms that ‘the eminent senator famed for his extreme and varied learning acquired without a teacher . . . states that the period of the Great Year coincides with the life of this bird (i.e. the phoenix), and that the same indications of the seasons and stars return again . . .’57 Clearly, then, the cycle of the phoenix and that of Sirius were one and the same to Tacitus and Pliny. Giving support to this view is the Egyptologist R.T. Rundle Clark, who wrote thatUnderlying all Egyptian speculation is the belief that time is composed of recurrent cycles which are divinely appointed: the day, the week of ten days, the month, the year (and) even longer periods . . . 1,460 years, determined according to the conjunction of sun, moon, stars and inundation. In a sense, when the Phoenix gave out its primeval call it initiated all these cycles, so it is the patron of all divisions of time, and its temple at Heliopolis became the centre of calendrical regulation. As the herald of each new dispensation, it becomes, optimistically, the harbinger of good tidings.58
Was the Step Pyramid complex, the ‘Star of Horus’, built as a sort of a calendrical centre locked into the ‘ideal New Year’s Day’ and the Sothic cycle?
The Oath of the Horus-King and the Calendar
Not long ago I hosted a group of British visitors to Egypt. Among them was Dr John Brown, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland.59 It was his first visit to Egypt and he was keen to see the ancient sites that were reputed to have astronomical features. During a visit to the Temple of Isis at Philae at dawn, we watched the sunrise and were inspired to talk about the Egyptian civil/solar calendar. But when I told Dr Brown that the ancient Egyptians did not make any adjustments to their calendar for the quarter-day difference in the year even though they were aware of it, he found this very hard to understand. Perhaps, he ventured, they were not, after all, aware of the quarter-day difference. I told him that this was not so, and that Egyptologists had hard evidence that the Egyptians were aware of the drift of their calendar relative to the seasons. I quoted the words of Professor Rolf Krause, an expert in this field, who asserts that ‘one can no longer maintain that the Egyptians did not realise the lack of ¼ day in their mobile year . . . the 365-day calendar was intentionally planned and inaugurated as a calendar which moved forward through the seasons’.60
‘Why did they not make the correction then?’ asked Dr Brown. Being a scientist, he found their obstinacy most trying. The answer, I informed him, was not a scientific one but a religious one: the Egyptians regarded their calendar ‘as a gift from the gods’, and thus sacred and not to be tampered with. To them it was not the calendar that drifted relative to the seasons, but the other way round: the seasons - and thus the declination and right ascension of the sun - drifted relative to the calendar. If the cosmic order required that the sun change position by one day every four years, then so be it. This was Maat, the cosmic order, and no one, not even the pharaoh, could or should make additions or deductions to it, no matter how illogical this might seem to us today.
The American Egyptologist Donald Redford, after giving a definition of Maat as ‘the ethical conceptions of truth and order, and cosmic balance’, went on to say that,One of the primary duties of the king was to maintain the order of the cosmos, effected by upholding the principle of Maat through correct and just rule and through service to the gods. The people of Egypt had an obligation to uphold Maat, through obedience to the king, who served as an intermediary between the divine and profane spheres.61
The British Egyptologist Cyril Aldred was to remark that ‘. . . the king was the personification of Maat, a word which we translate as “truth” or “justice”, but has an extended meaning of the proper cosmic order at the time of its establishment by the Creator’.62 Thus the king was not merely expected to uphold Maat, he actually embodied Maat, and his primary role was to ensure through his divine power that no changes were made to it. But how could the king, or indeed anyone, ‘change’ the cosmic order? A clue is provided by the Macedonian poet Aratus, who visited Egypt in the third century BC as a guest of King Ptolemy Philadesphus, and wrote tha
t: ‘each Egyptian king on his accession to the throne, bound himself by oath before the priests . . . not to intercalate either days or months, but to retain the year of 365 days as decreed by the ancients.’63 And Sir Norman Lockyer was among the first modern scientists to fully appreciate that ‘to retain this year of 365 days, then, became the first law for the king, and, indeed, the pharaohs; thenceforth the whole course of Egyptian history adhered to it, in spite of their being subsequently convinced . . . of its inadequacy’.64
In 238 BC, one ‘Greek’ pharaoh, Ptolemy III, did, in fact, attempt to enforce a leap year to the calendar, but he was met with such fierce opposition by the Egyptian priests that the idea was quickly abandoned.65 Julius Caesar made another attempt in 48 BC, but even this new ‘Julian Calendar’ was rejected by the native priests. It was not until the arrival of Augustus Caesar in Egypt in 30 BC that the leap year was finally enforced.66 Such intractable behaviour on the part of the Egyptian priests can only be explained by their unflinching commitment not to alter Maat. Recently scholars have also come to appreciate that a ‘drifting’ year of 365 days will, in fact, readjust itself ad infinitum much better than any man-made calendar which may include a leap year or other fine-tuning. Let us see how.
Anne-Sophie Bomhard, in her book The Egyptian Calendar: A Work for Eternity, called the Egyptian calendar ‘the gliding calendar’ because this is precisely what it did: ‘glide’ around the seasons. Simple calculation shows that if left free to glide in this way, the calendar returns to its starting point every 1,506 years and resynchronises itself perfectly with the seasons.67 This, Bomhard argued, made it needless to add a leap year or any other mathematical adjustments for fine-tuning, because, in her words, this is ‘the most difficult stumbling block for any calendaric construction’. For example, even though we add a leap year to our Gregorian calendar, this will still not perfectly retune with the seasons, because we assume the seasonal year to be 365.25 days whereas it is, in fact, 365.2422 days. So there is still a need to make some extra minuscule adjustments every so often. Yet even with the best of fine-tuning, absolute perfection is still not possible, and it is calculated that our calendar will lose a whole day every 3,000 years or so and, consequently, need another adjustment. On the other hand, as Bomhard correctly argues, by leaving their own 365-day civil calendar to drift through the seasons, the ancient Egyptians achieved a perfect system of long-term time-keeping because their civil calendar naturally resynchronised every 1,506 years, making it a much better calendrical instrument than our Gregorian calendar which requires constant mathematical adjustments to keep it running as close as possible (but never perfectly) to the true solar year.68
The stark reality is that our planet revolves around the sun in an inexact number of days.69 Counting the days from sunrise on 1 January to the next 1 January, one will have to wait a further six hours (till around noon) for the true solar year to end. But this kind of reckoning goes against the way in which we perceive a ‘day’. In our mind a day is a day, that is from sunrise to sunrise (or sunset to sunset, as the Jews prefer), and our mental perception is hard pressed to envision it being a fraction of this length. The ancient Egyptians were no different from us. Where we do differ, however, is in the way we think of the sun: to the ancients it was the manifestation of the supreme god, who, for reasons known only to him, chose to glide around the seasons in a majestic slow cycle of 1,506 years (which we have termed the Great Solar Cycle). And since the pharaoh was the manifestation of the sun on earth, and that his primary duty was to maintain the cosmic order, he had to resist any attempt to alter this incontrovertible fact. Indeed, as we have already seen, at his coronation the pharaoh had to take a solemn oath not to change the ‘year’. This resulted in an observable phenomenon: starting from New Year’s Day (1 Thoth), the sun would very slowly glide in time along the eastern horizon. From its original place at the summer solstice 28° north of east, the sunrise would glide to the winter solstice at 28° south of east, and then slowly back again, the whole process taking 1,506 years. In other words, the place of ‘birth of Ra-Horakhti’ changed from a point in the north to a point in the south and back again in a cycle of 1,506 years, i.e. the Great Solar Cycle. This cycle, as we shall see later, may have been the cause of the curious cyclical migration of the sun-priests from north to south and back again that took place in Egypt’s 3,000-year-long history.
But more on this later. Meanwhile let us look again at Djoser’s Step Pyramid complex, but this time with these long-term cycles in mind. We have seen how the Step Pyramid is orientated in such a way that it could have served as a time-marker for the rising of Sirius. This feature, as well as its name, ‘Horus is the Star at the Head of the Sky’, certainly suggests, if not confirms, that it was symbolic of Sirius. This conclusion may not be as far-fetched as it first appears, for the principal occupation of its designer, Imhotep (who was the high priest of Heliopolis), was the observation and recording of the cycles of Sirius in connection to the rebirth of the pharaoh and the flooding of the Nile. Heliopolis, after all, was the centre of calendrical studies, and also the place where the phoenix returned every 1,460 years - an event that was probably equated to the return of the Sothic cycle, i.e. the return of the heliacal rising of Sirius to 1 Thoth every 1,460 years.
Could the Step Pyramid complex be an architectural expression of the phoenix?
The Sothic Cycle and the Wall
Since the mid-1980s I have been using the facilities of the library of the Griffith Institute at Oxford (now part of the new Sackler’s Library). The Griffith is conveniently located less than an hour’s drive from my home, and it has the advantage of being part of the Ashmolean Museum which has an excellent collection of Egyptian antiquities. I have known its director, Dr Jaromir Malek, since 1987.70 The Griffith Institute has a wide range of books, monographs and articles on Egyptology, and there is a large section on pyramid research and exploration that I particularly enjoy. It was during one of my browsing sessions there that I pulled out by chance a book written by a French researcher. As I was about to put it back in its place, fate would have it that it fell from my hands and lay open at a page with the title: ‘Le complexe calendaire de Djeser à Saqqara’ (The calendrical complex of Djoser at Saqqara). I was, of course, immediately intrigued by this title. There was, to my surprise, a diagram of the boundary wall of the complex with the number 1,461 next to it. I immediately made a photocopy of this diagram and took it home with me.
Details of the boundary wall of the Djoser complex
Looking more closely at the curious architectural features of the boundary wall of the complex based on a reconstructed plan by Jean-Philippe Lauer, it could be easily deduced that there was a total of 192 recesses and protrusions, 14 false doors, four corner bastions and one main entrance. Few researchers, however, had paid much attention to the hundreds of slender horizontal panels that were also an integral part of the design. What was most intriguing about these panels was that the west side of the boundary wall contained 1,461 of them, and the east side 1,459. The uncanny similarity of these values to the Sothic cycle of 1,460-1 years was obvious. In my mind this could not be a coincidence, not with the conclusions I had arrived at regarding the connection between the Step Pyramid and Sirius. But what could be the meaning and purpose of it?
A Jubilee Centre for Eternity?
On the eastern side of the Step Pyramid complex there are four stone pavilions set in a row which are referred to by Egyptologists as ‘dummy structures’. They are, in fact, models of movable wooden pavilions that were used for the so-called heb-sed festivals, or jubilees of the king. According to the consensus these dummy pavilions were intended for the heb-sed festivals that the king wished to celebrate in his eternal afterlife. As Egyptologists Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson asserted, ‘. . . the first mortuary complexes were concerned with the king’s enactment of the sed-festival. The eastern side of the step pyramid complex of Djoser at Saqqara incorporates the earliest architectural setting for the fe
stival.’71 In his description of the Step Pyramid complex, Mark Lehner remarks that the ‘tomb building appears to have been part of a larger ceremonial cycle . . . the fictive architecture served the king’s Ka in the afterlife.’72 In other words, the Step Pyramid complex, or at least a large part of it, was a jubilee centre for eternity.
The heb-sed festival (sometimes called simply heb-sed or sed-festival) is generally described by Egyptologists as a royal jubilee. In reality, however, it was much more than that. In early times the king’s future reign, and perhaps even his own life, depended on its success. For this festival was a sort of fitness test that the king had to endure from time to time to reassure the people that he still possessed the full faculties and sexual potency required to rule Egypt as a god and, more importantly, to be fit and able to maintain the cosmic order. As Egyptologist G.A. Wainwright explains:. . . nothing is more certain than that the pharaoh was divine . . . Kings of this type contained within themselves the power that produced prosperity . . . To do all this, a divine fertility-king must keep himself in good health and live a well-ordered life. For as he functions regularly and in good order, so will the universe remain stable and continue in its allotted course, for he is himself the universe. The service rendered by such kings has always been to ensure the fruitfulness of the earth, and consequent health of the people . . .73
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