Musical Chairs with Pyramids
The founder of the great Fourth Dynasty was the pharaoh Snefru, the son of Djoser. But instead of building a step pyramid like his father at Saqqara, Snefru invented the new design of the ‘true’ or smooth-faced pyramid and built not one but two pyramids seven kilometres south of Saqqara, at a site called Dashur. Oddly enough, the site of Dashur is not on a promontory like Saqqara, nor does it have any special geological features that may have warranted a move so far away from the Step Pyramid. Immediately after Snefru died, his son, the pharaoh Khufu, did the opposite of his father: he moved 12 kilometres north of Saqqara, and built his giant pyramid on the high promontory we call the Giza plateau. This curious moving around continued with his son, Djedefra, who decamped another eight kilometres north and built his own pyramid at a place called Abu Ruwash. His two successors, Khafra and Menkaura, returned to Giza and build their pyramids next to Khufu’s. Then the Fifth Dynasty came along. Its first pharaoh, Userkaf, returned to Saqqara and built his pyramid next to Djoser’s Step Pyramid. His six successors, however, all moved north of Saqqara and raised their pyramids at a place called Abusir. Yet the last king of the Fifth Dynasty returned to Saqqara to build his pyramid south of the Step Pyramid of Djoser.
What drove these kings to play musical chairs with their pyramids all over the Memphite region? Take the case of Khufu. The standard explanation is that he chose the Giza plateau because it had a commanding view over the whole Memphite region. But if that was the true motive behind his choice of location, then we may well ask why his father Snefru or, for that matter, his grandfather Djoser, did not grab this prime afterlife site for themselves. Miroslav Verner, the eminent Czech Egyptologist, puzzled over this enigma in another way:The reasons why the ancient Egyptians buried their dead on the edge of the desert on the western bank of the Nile are evident enough. The same, however, cannot be said of the reasons for their particular choice of sites for pyramid-building. Why, for example, did the founder of the Fourth Dynasty, Snefru, build his first pyramid at Meydum then abandoned the place, building another two of his pyramids approximately 50 kilometres further north of Dashur? Why did his son Khufu build his tomb, the celebrated Great Pyramid, still further to the north in Giza? . . . the questions are numerous, and, as a rule, answers to them remain on the level of conjecture.1
In 1983 I came up with some conjecture of my own. I wrote to a selection of eminent Egyptologists and suggested to them that the reason for this apparent unruly scattering of pyramids along the 40-kilometre strip of desert they call the Memphite Necropolis had little if anything to do with engineering or geological practicalities, as is often suggested, but rather with religion. To be more specific, I proposed a controversial new idea: that the religious motive was to replicate on the land the scattering of stars that were said to be in the Duat. Not too unexpectedly, I was patronisingly told to mind my own business.2 In any case, according to Egyptologists the pyramids had nothing or very little to do with the stars, but were symbols of the sun. This ‘solar’ tag was so entrenched in Egyptology that anyone suggesting otherwise, and especially an outsider speaking of a connection with the stars, was bound to be ignored at best or severely pilloried and ridiculed at worst. As for the bizarre random scattering of pyramids in clusters in the open desert, this, virtually all Egyptologists insisted, had nothing to do with imaginary stellar plans (or any plan for that matter), but rather with a pharaoh’s whim to have his pyramid near his palace or because of the discovery of a better supply of limestone. There was, however, no convincing evidence that the pharaohs had palaces at different locations, and as Miroslav Verner argued, ‘limestone occurs almost everywhere in the area of the Memphite necropolis and the technical difficulties in obtaining it and transporting it to the building site did not vary substantially between the different places’.3
By 1994, however, some second thoughts on the ‘religious’ idea were beginning to be aired. We have seen how the director of the Griffith Institute at Oxford, Dr. Jasomir Malek, after reviewing my book The Orion Mystery, felt that ‘the idea that the distribution of the pyramids is governed by definable ideological (religious, astronomical, or similar) considerations is attractive.’4
Mark Lehner also relented a little by offering that ‘some religious or cosmic impulse beyond the purely practical may also have influenced the ancient surveyors’, although he remained sceptical about a stellar-based plan.5 As far as Lehner is concerned, the possible ‘cosmic impulse’ that may have influenced the choice of location for a pyramid site came from the emerging powerful sun-religion of Ra at Heliopolis that had apparently reached its peak in the Fourth Dynasty. His colleague Dr Zahi Hawass even went so far as to claim that Khufu, its second king, demanded to be venerated as Ra on earth-a theory that, for a while at least, gained much support among other Egyptologists. There is, admittedly, much that invites such views. For example, it is true that after Khufu’s death, many of his successors incorporated the name of Ra to their own - Djedefra, Khafra, Menkaura, Sahura and so on. They also took the title ‘Son of Ra’.6 According to Mark Lehner:. . . the pyramid built by Djededfre, Khufu’s son and successor, [is] 8 kilometre (5 miles) to the north on a hillock overlooking the Giza plateau. By moving to this spot (Abu Roash), Djedefre’s pyramid was nearer due west of Heliopolis, centre of the sun cult, than Giza. Perhaps he was motivated by religious reasons since Djedefre is the first pharaoh to take the title ‘Son of Re’.7
Map of the Memphite Necropolis. 14, 15, 16 and 17 are the Abusir Pyramids. 18 and 19 are the Sun Temples of Abu Ghorab. 22, 23 and 24 are the Giza Pyramids.
Lehner might be right in this supposition. Saying, however, that Djedefra’s pyramid was ‘nearer due west’ of Heliopolis is somewhat off the mark. Measuring from a scaled map of the Memphite Necropolis,8 it is obvious that Djedefra’s pyramid is nearer 27° south-of-west from Heliopolis. At this latitude this is the orientation of the setting sun at the winter solstice. Alternatively, an observer at Djedefra’s pyramid looking east towards Heliopolis would have seen the sun rising directly over Heliopolis on or very near the day of the summer solstice,9 which can hardly be taken as a coincidence in these circumstances. The reader will recall from Chapter Two how important the summer solstice was to the feast of the ‘Birth of Ra’, when the civil calendar was inaugurated. At any rate, the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Dynasty may also have been due to a dynastic coup d’état when a priestess called Rudjdjedet, wife of the high priest of Heliopolis, gave birth to triplets which she claimed had been conceived by Ra himself.10 All three were to become kings. Two of these sun-kings, Sahura and Neferikara, incorporated the name of Ra to their own, and although the third, Userkaf, did not, he nonetheless took the unprecedented step of building a sun temple that was modelled on the great temple of Ra at Heliopolis.11 The curious thing about Userkaf’s sun temple, however, is that it was not built near his pyramid at Saqqara but at Abu Ghorab, some three kilometres away to the north. Indeed five of the so-called sun-kings of the Fifth Dynasty who followed Userkaf also built temples at Abu Ghorab, even though their pyramids were raised a kilometre or so to the south at Abusir (nearer Saqqara).12 Until recently no one quite understood why these sun temples were built at all and why, more intriguingly, they were placed away from their corresponding pyramids. Only two of the six have been found by archaeologists - Userkaf’s and Niussera’s. We know of the others only by their names found in contemporary inscriptions: ‘The stronghold of Ra’, ‘The Offering Fields of Ra’, ‘The Favourite Place of Ra’, ‘The Offering Table of Ra’, ‘The Delight of Ra’, and ‘The Horizon of Ra’. This very obvious connection with the sun-god of Heliopolis, however, was not merely spiritual. According to a new theory by British Egyptologist David Jeffreys, it was all about their exact location relative to Heliopolis.
Map of the Giza-Ausim-Heliopolis region
In the late 1990s, Jeffreys was conducting a survey in the area of Memphis on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Society. Armed with the latest topogr
aphical maps and good surveying equipment, he was puzzled by the fact that whereas from the sun temples of Userkaf and Niussera he had an unobstructed line of sight to Heliopolis, if he moved just a little further south towards the Abusir pyramids, his view was cut off by the Muqattam hills.13 In a flash of inspiration Jeffreys realised that perhaps this was the reason why the sun temples were built some distance north of their corresponding pyramids. This also meant, of course, that all the pyramids north of Abu Ghorab (which included Zawyat Al Aryan, Giza and Abu Ruwash) also had clear unobstructed views to Heliopolis, whereas those south of Abu Ghorab (including Abusir, Saqqara, Dashur and all others up to Meydum) simply did not. It struck him that only the Fourth Dynasty pyramids and Fifth Dynasty sun temples had unobstructed lines of sight to Heliopolis, and that it was these two dynasties that allegedly had special reverence for the sun-god Ra of Heliopolis. In Jeffreys’ own words:A re-examination of the location of Pyramids whose owners claim or display a special association with the solar cult betrays a cluster pattern for which a political and religious explanation suggests itself . . . The Giza pyramids could also be seen from Heliopolis . . . It is therefore appropriate to ask, in a landscape as prospect-dominated as the Nile Valley, which sites and monuments were mutually visible and whether their respective locations, horizons and vistas are owed to something more than mere coincidence.14
At long last here was a prominent and well-respected Egyptologist who was proposing nothing less than ‘a re-examination of the location’ of the pyramids which could account for ‘the oscillation in the location of pyramid sites’ or, in other words, the scattering of pyramid clusters along the 40 kilometre strip of desert which is the Memphite Necropolis. It was nothing short of a major breakthrough. This is because it brought on to the academic table the strong possibility that pyramids - at the very least those with lines of sight to Heliopolis - were interrelated by the same surveying motive, implying a master plan that took into account the vast area encompassed by the Memphite Necropolis and Heliopolis.
The Master Plan
Having worked in the construction industry for many years in the Middle East, often surveying vast areas of open desert for new roads and remote military bases, I knew that a project as vast as that suggested above would require a fixed point or datum from which a topographic survey grid could emanate. The location of this datum point would, ideally, be at the intersection of a prime latitude and a prime meridian that would become the X-Y axes of a huge grid. Since the principal objective of the project would be the positioning of pyramids along a strip of desert running from Abu Ruwash to Abusir, with the added requirement of them having clear lines of sight to Heliopolis, the ideal location for this datum point would be somewhere due west of Heliopolis and due north of Giza. Working with a good map of the region, I easily established that this point would fall within the modern town of Ausim, once called by the Greeks Letopolis and Khem by the ancient Egyptians.
Little is known about Letopolis other than that it had been an important religious centre dedicated to the god Horus the Elder as early as the First or Second Dynasties, perhaps even harking back to the late prehistoric period. Today nothing remains of Letopolis except for a few dilapidated ruins dating from the late period attributed to the last indigenous pharaohs, including Nectanebo I (380-362 BC). Ausim is now a typical slum of Greater Cairo (sadly the same fate has befallen ancient Heliopolis, the modern Matareya).15 At any rate, it is very tempting to postulate that there might once have existed here at Letopolis an observation tower from which the ancient surveyors could have projected their grid lines towards Heliopolis in the east and the various pyramid fields in the south. George Goyon, the director of the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques in Paris and professor at the Collège de France, certainly thinks so . . .
The Observatory of Eudoxus at Letopolis
In the early 1970s George Goyon took a keen interest in the writings of the Roman geographer Strabo, who had visited Egypt in c. AD 30. According to Strabo:. . . the city of Kerkasore, which is located near the observatory of Eudoxus, is in the Libyan side (i.e. western bank) of the Nile, where there is a sort of watch-tower which can be seen from Heliopolis [and] from which Eudoxus made his observations of the movement of the celestial bodies. There is the Letopolite Nome.16
Goyon had not heard before of this mysterious city of Kerkasore, but because of the description and location details that Strabo gave, Goyon suspected that he was in fact talking about the ancient site of Letopolis, and that the watch tower he was referring to was some kind of observation tower used by the ancient astronomer-priests of Heliopolis. Since Strabo had called this tower the ‘observatory of Eudoxus’, Goyon decided to investigate whether it was indeed at Letopolis that Eudoxus might have made his famous observations of ‘the movement of the celestial bodies’.
Isometric view of the Giza Plateau, Letopolis and Heliopolis
Eudoxus of Cnidus (408-355 BC) was one of Greece’s most eminent mathematicians, and it is recorded that he visited Egypt in c. 370 BC for two years as a student at the sun temple of Heliopolis, there to learn the science of astronomy from the Egyptian priests. From an analysis of Strabo’s commentary and also those of other ancient writers who mentioned the mysterious location of Kerkasore in passing (Herodotus, Pomponius Mela, and Quintus Curtius), Goyon was able to establish that it had been located about 100 stadium (15.7 kilometres) due north of Giza and 100 stadium due west of Heliopolis. These coordinates mark a spot very near the present modern town of Ausim. Seeing that Ausim was due north of the Great Pyramid, Goyon became convinced that the tower from which Eudoxus had studied the stars might have been the remnants of a very ancient bollard that had served as a sighting point for the ancient pyramid-builders to maintain the monument in a true north orientation during its construction.17 He suggested that the Eudoxus tower had been, in probability, very similar to the squat obelisk-shaped towers that stood at the sun temples at Abu Ghorab, and that, like them, its top was probably fitted with a polished metal disc from which reflected the sun’s rays like that of a lighthouse.18
What made Goyon’s hypothesis so convincing was that it was well-known that Letopolis, since earliest times, had been the capital of the second Nome of Lower Egypt, whose emblem was a bull’s thigh, which, according to Goyon, ‘means the constellation of Ursa Major’ (or rather the Plough, as we have seen earlier).19 British Egyptologist G.A. Wainwright had also shown that the deity known as ‘Horus of Letopolis’ was the traditional keeper of the ritualistic adze used in the ‘opening of the mouth’ that was shaped like the Plough and bore the same name, i.e. meskhetiu, or bull’s thigh.20 We should recall that this constellation was, of course, the celestial target for the ‘stretching of the cord’ ceremony to align pyramids and temples towards the north. But there was, too, another important constellation involved in this alignment ceremony and which, according to Richard Wilkinson, relied on sightings not only of the Great Bear but also of ‘the Orion constellations’.21 Evidence of such astronomical symbolism to denote the north and south of a place is found at the temple of Horus at Edfu, where an inscription referring to the ‘stretching of the cord’ ceremony also states that the north side of the temple was the ‘bull’s thigh’ and the south side was ‘Orion’.22 The same north-south symbolism is also found in many of the so-called astronomical ceilings of the New Kingdom where north is symbolised by the bull’s thigh and south by Orion (and also Sirius).
Bearing this in mind, it follows that an ancient observer placed at the Giza plateau at night looking due north would have seen the Plough transiting directly over Letopolis, while another observer placed at Letopolis looking due south would have seen Orion’s belt transiting over the Great Pyramid. Giza and Letopolis are thus interrelated, and the latter, which is also due west of Heliopolis, must by necessity be added to the master plan that I am proposing. These three locations - Giza, Letopolis and Heliopolis - form a huge Pythagorean triangle, with two of its corners - the north at Letopoli
s and the south at Giza - appearing to represent two prominent constellations, the Plough and Orion’s belt, on the ground. These two constellations are on the west bank of the Milky Way. Could the third corner of the triangle, at Heliopolis, which lies across the Nile some 18 kilometres due east of Letopolis, also be denoting a prominent constellation that is on the eastern bank of the Milky Way and is seen due east from Letopolis? Which constellation could that be? A fortuitous inscription that refers to the ‘stretching of the cord’ ceremony gives us a clue: ‘The king has built the Great Temple of Ra-Horakhti in conformity with the horizon which bears his disc; the cord was stretched by his Majesty himself, having held the rod in his hand with Seshat . . .’23
Could the Great Temple of Ra-Horakhti-a name applied specifically to the Great Temple of Heliopolis - have represented a prominent constellation that coalesced with the sun disc in the eastern horizon at dawn?
The Coalescing of Ra and Horakhti in the East
‘An important mythological aspect of the solar god in the heavens,’ wrote Egyptologist Richard Wilkinson, ‘is found in his identity as a cosmic lion.’ Furthermore, Wilkinson was of the opinion that ‘the stellar constellation now known as Leo was also recognised by the Egyptians as being in the form of a recumbent lion . . . (and that) the constellation was directly associated with the sun god’.24 Wilkinson proposed that when the sun god Ra rose to prominence during the Fourth Dynasty, he was ‘coalesced’ with the primitive god Horakhti thus ‘becoming Ra-Horakhti as the morning sun’.25
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