The Egypt Code

by Robert Bauval

  The Czech Egyptologist Zbynek Zaba, who is well known for his studies in ancient Egyptian astronomy, had this to say about Proclus’s commentary:Until now it has been believed that the Egyptians were not aware of the movement of the fixed stars caused by the precession of the axis of the planet. I believe that the diagrams of the Egyptians of the starry sky tend to prove the contrary. Proclus Diadochus affirms that the Egyptians discovered not only the movement of the fixed stars but also the precession of the equinoxes which is another consequence of the precession of the axis of the planet. To this we have no proof so far, and it is possible that the discovery of the precession of the equinoxes rests entirely with Hipparchus. It is nonetheless more probable, in my opinion, that even this discovery had been made by the ancient Egyptians, and that Proclus was well informed . . .21

  But how well informed was Proclus? First it should be pointed out that he was no dilettante. This was especially true when it came to matters regarding the writings of Plato. So his claim that the Egyptian priests taught Plato the secrets of precession was not something that he plucked from thin air.

  Proclus was born in AD 411 in Constantinople (now Istanbul), and for many years he had been a student of the great Neoplatonic philosopher Olympiadorus of Alexandria. Later he also studied under the great Plutarch and Syrianus at the famous academy in Athens which, as is well known, was founded by Plato. Proclus eventually became the head of the Platonic academy and remained an important figure there until his death in AD 485. While at the academy, he specialised in the works of Aristotle and Plato, which were then all available to him. In one of Plato’s works the great philosopher had written of ‘the beauty and clarity of the skies in Egypt’ and how this allowed the Egyptians to see ‘all the stars’, which they had observed and studied ‘for 10,000 years, or an infinity number of years so to speak’. Plato was not alone in attributing great antiquity to the ancient Egyptian sky-watchers. Other scholars, such as Aristotle, Seneca, Diodorus, Simplicius and Strabo, also wrote of how the Egyptian priests had carefully studied the stars for thousands of years.22 If this is true - and there is no reason to think otherwise - then it is difficult, indeed impossible, to see how the avid Egyptian stargazers would not have noticed over a few generations the apparent movement of the fixed stars caused by the effect of precession.

  The possibility that precession was known to the ancient Egyptians was first seriously brought up in the late 1820s by the French astronomer Jean-Baptiste Biot, a member of the prestigious Académie Française. Biot was convinced not only that the ancient Egyptian priests were aware of the precession of the equinoxes, but also that they had tracked its effect through the ages:. . . they would have been able, even in the course of a few years, to recognise that the course of the rising and setting points of different stars were changing place on the horizon after a certain period of time, were no longer at the same terrestrial alignment. They would thus have been able to verify the general and progressive displacement of the celestial sphere relative to the meridian line, that is to say the most apparent effect of the precession of the equinoxes.23

  The next scholar to entertain such views was the British astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer. According to Lockyer:The various apparent movements of the heavenly bodies which are produced by the rotation and the revolution of the earth, and the effect of precession, were familiar to the Egyptians, however ignorant they may have been of their causes; they carefully studied what they saw, and attempted to put their knowledge together in the most convenient fashion, associating it with their strange imaginings of their system of worship.24

  Recently the Russian astronomer Dr Alexander Gurshtein, vice-president of the History of Astronomy of the IAU (International Astronomical Union), used his full academic stature to support the idea that the ancient Egyptians were aware of the shift of the vernal point against the fixed stars and, consequently, were aware of the precession of the equinoxes.25 Even more recently these same views were expressed by the Italian astronomer Giulio Magli, an associate professor at the Department of Mathematics at Milano Politecnico.26 Even the usually sceptical American astronomer E.C. Krupp was open to this idea when he wrote that. . . circumstantial evidence implies that the awareness of the shifting equinoxes may be of considerable antiquity, for we find, in Egypt at least, a succession of cults whose iconography and interest focus on duality, the bull, and the ram at appropriate periods for Gemini, Taurus, and Aries in the precessional cycle of the equinoxes.27

  Krupp added, however, that ‘whether the Egyptians were fully aware of precession is one thing; whether they responded to it is another.’28 Since those words were written, further research has shown that the ancient Egyptians did, in fact, respond to it by changing the axis of many temples that had been aligned to the rising of Sirius. We know at least three such examples where they did this over hundreds of years: the temple of Satis on Elephantine Island; the temple of Isis at Dendera, and the temple of Horus on Thoth Hill near Luxor.

  Plan of the Evolution of the Satet Temple on Elephantine Island

  The Temples of Satis that followed Sirius

  Elephantine Island is just a mile or so downriver from the first cataract on the Nile near the modern town of Aswan.29 The Nile at this point is at its widest and its water is crystal clear with a wonderful deep blue tone. Its banks are lined with tall palm trees and multicoloured bougainvillaea and oleanders. On the west bank rise high sand dunes that catch the pink light of the early morning sun. White egrets fly along the river and water buffaloes float lazily in the shallows, while children swim around and women squat by the water’s edge to do their laundry. The gift of the Nile is well appreciated here at Elephantine. Here the river truly excels.

  Elephantine was once the capital of the First Nome of Upper Egypt and was sacred to Khnum, the ram-headed creator god who fashioned mankind on his divine potter’s wheel. It was also sacred to his elegant consort, the goddess Satet or Satis (in Greek), who was closely identified with the Nile’s flood. It is this goddess who predominated here at Elephantine, because throughout ancient times this place was considered the mouth of the netherworld or Duat from where the Nile’s flood emerged.30 Satis was also the guardian of the southern frontier of Egypt, protecting it from invaders with her divine bow and arrow. Not surprisingly, she was later identified with the Greek Artemis, the divine huntress.

  Satis’s name is first attested on jars found under the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. This should be of particular interest to us, because she was also identified with the star Sirius, the herald of the Nile flood. The reader will recall how in Chapter One we associated the Step Pyramid at Saqqara with the star Sirius, a fact also attested by the name of the pyramid: ‘Horus is the Star at the Head of the Sky’. Satis is mentioned in the Pyramid Texts, where she is said to purify the dead king with the divine flood water brought in jars from Elephantine.31 She is usually shown as a tall, slender woman wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt from which protrude two antelope horns. On the front of the crown is often seen a five-pointed star, which almost certainly represented Sirius, a symbol of the flood. There is also an assortment of epithets attesting to Satis’s close connection with the stellar world and implying her cosmic identity as Sirius: ‘Lady of Stars’; ‘Mistress of the eastern horizon of the sky, at whose sight everyone rejoices’; ‘The Great One in the Sky, ruler of the Stars’; ‘Satis who brightens the two lands with her beauty’ and so on.32

  Elephantine Island is just two kilometres long and half a kilometre wide. On it were found the remains of several ancient temples, the largest being the temple of Khnum, located on the south side of the island. North of Khnum’s temple is the smaller temple of Satis. Archaeological evidence shows that the island has been inhabited since predynastic times, and a team from the German Archaeology Institute of Cairo discovered underneath the temple of Satis evidence of earlier temples going back to the early dynastic period. Indeed, the peculiarity of the temple of Satis is that it is built on the ruins of several other
temples going down in tiers like some giant wedding cake, starting at the bottom with an early dynastic shrine dated to about 2900 BC, then an Old Kingdom shrine dated to 2200 BC, then a Middle Kingdom shrine dated to about 1800 BC, then a New Kingdom shrine, and finally the restored Ptolemaic temple which is seen today and dated to the second century BC.33

  Plan of the Satet temple

  In 1983 the astronomer Ron Wells from the University of California took an interest in the Satis temple and decided to investigate its alignments.34 Wells had a hunch that the 2,800-years evolution of this temple, coupled with the fact that Satis was closely associated with the Nile’s flood and thus the heliacal rising of Sirius, might yield some interesting astronomical results. Wells knew that the last temple of Satis on this site was built in the Ptolemaic period, and it was obvious to him - even when looking with the naked eye - that its axis was aligned a few degrees further north than the axis of the earlier temple built underneath it. Wells had a hunch that this northerly shift could be explained by the northerly shift of Sirius caused by precession. Making use of the pole star, Polaris (Alpha Ursa Minor), to establish true north, he calculated that the orientation of the Ptolemaic temple was 24.65° south-of-east and that the axis of the earlier New Kingdom temple underneath was 30.60° south-of-east. To his astonishment, he found that this 5.95° difference exactly matched the precessional drift of Sirius during the time between the building of the two temples.35 Although the axis of the early-dynasty temple further underneath could not be determined with accuracy, it was obvious that it was deviated even more to the south than the earlier temples above it, confirming that the ancient Egyptian surveyors had been aware of the effect of precession on the star Sirius and, more intriguingly, had also tracked it for nearly three millennia.36

  Tracking Sirius Again: From Rameses II to Augustus Caesar

  The same curious tracking of Sirius is also evident at Dendera. This region in northern Upper Egypt is near the modern town of Qena, some 60 kilometres north of Luxor as the crow flies. Known as Iunet or Tentere (Tentyris in Greek) in ancient times, it was the capital of the Sixth Nome of Upper Egypt. Today a visit to Dendera starts at Luxor, where your taxi or coach must join a convoy under the protection of armed policemen. Apart from this amusing inconvenience, the drive along the Nile is marvellous, as this part of Upper Egypt is rich in agricultural land and pretty traditional villages along the way. At Qena you cross the Nile over a modern bridge to the west side where the great temple complex of Hathor stands in glorious isolation at the edge of the western desert.

  A goddess whose origin goes back into prehistory, Hathor ranked very high in the Egyptian pantheon. She was the great cow-eared goddess, protector of lovers and dancers, patron of merrymaking and sexuality. Her name literally meant ‘House of Horus’ (Hat-Hor),37 and as such, she was regarded as the divine nurse (some say mother) of the reigning Horus-king. Hathor was very closely associated with the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris and mother of Horus. Indeed, so close were Hathor and Isis that in Ptolemaic times their names were either fused or interchangeable, as the following inscription at Dendera relating to Hathor clearly shows: ‘The beautiful one who appears in heaven, the truth which regulates the world at the head of the sun barge, the queen and mistress of awe, the ruler (of gods and) goddess, Isis the Great, the mother of gods.’38 In very early times the city of Memphis was an important centre of worship for Hathor, and there she was known as the ‘Lady of the Sycamore’. But by the time of the Old Kingdom her cult centre was well established at Dendera.

  The great antiquity of Dendera is attested by tombs there that go back to the first dynasties.39 The temple of Hathor as we see it today was founded by Ptolemy XII Auletes in 54 BC and further developed during the Roman period, but it is known that there existed an older temple at this site dating from the reign of Thothmoses III (c. 1450 BC). Also, an inscription on a wall at Dendera mentions the pharaoh Pepi I of the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2350 BC), suggestive of an even earlier origin for the temple. There are also inscriptions in one of the crypts that speak of the time of the legendary Shemsu-Hor, or ‘Followers of Horus’ (although Egyptologists discount them as being ‘mythical’ ancestors).40 Indeed, one of the inscriptions claims that the original blueprint of the temple was drawn by the Shemsu-Hor themselves and was preserved on the temple walls by King Pepi I:King Tuthmoses III has caused this building to be erected in memory of his mother, the goddess Hathor, the Lady of Dendera, the Eye of the Sun, the Heavenly Queen of the Gods. The ground plan was found in the city of Dendera, in archaic drawing on a leather roll of the time of the Shemsu-Hor (Followers of Horus); it was (also) found in the interior of a brick wall in the south side of the temple in the reign of king Pepi.41

  The Dendera complex is normally approached through an imposing arch on the north side of the boundary wall that leads into a vast open courtyard. The great temple of Hathor, which is aligned roughly south-north, is reached along a processional road starting from the arch. Upon arriving at its huge gate, you are confronted by six imposing columns whose four-sided capitals are carved with faces of Hathor. These columns support the huge beams that span the north side of the temple’s roof. There are a further 18 columns in the first hypostyle hall, and six more in the inner hypostyle hall. Immediately to the west of the open courtyard is a mammisi, or ‘birth house’, built in Roman times. And to the west of the main temple is another of these mysterious mammisi, built by Nectanebo I, as well as a sanatorium. Further along the west side of the temple is a sacred lake (now dry, with palm trees growing in it). To the rear of the main temple is a small temple which stands alone and, curiously, has its own monumental entrance in the east side of the boundary wall of the complex. This is also a mammisi of sorts with a very special claim: it is said to be the birthplace of Isis, and thus is also known as the temple of Isis. It is the alignment of this particular temple which we shall now examine carefully.

  The temple of Isis is unique in that its outer area is aligned west-east while its inner area is aligned south-north and is thus parallel to the axis of the main temple of Hathor. The impression one gets is that something in the eastern horizon was meant to be observed simultaneously with something else seen in the northern horizon. But what?

  In 1891, the astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer took particular notice of the temple of Isis when he came across the writings of the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, who seemed to have given this little temple a direct connection with the star Sirius. In one of his works Mariette had pointed out that the temple ‘is to the south-west of the temple of Hathor, its portal is turned to the east, and the sun shines on its portal when it rises to illuminate the world’. Here is Mariette’s own translation of the inscription that implied this cosmic function: ‘She (i.e. the star of Isis) shines into her temple on New Year’s Day, and she mingles her light with that of her Father Ra on the horizon.’42 From this inscription there can be little doubt that the ancient scribe was describing the heliacal rising of Sirius at dawn.43 For the reader will recall how the heliacal rising of Sirius marked the New Year’s Day when the calendar was invented in c. 2781 BC (which seems to be the same New Year’s Day now celebrated at Dendera). Apparently every New Year’s Day an effigy representing the ba (star soul) of Hathor-Isis was taken on to the roof of the temple at dawn so that the light of the rising sun could mingle with it. Now, as the astronomer Edwin Krupp pointed out, ‘some traditions preserved at Dendera are thousands of years old’.44 He also agreed that these inscriptions ‘describe metaphorically the heliacal rising of Sirius’, and quoted one such inscription himself:Radiant rises the golden one (Hathor-Isis-Sirius) above the head of her father (near but in advance of the sun) and her mysterious form is at the head of his solar boat . . . As her fellow divinities (the other stars) unite with her father’s rays and as they merge with the glittering of his disk, Dendera is joyful . . . There is a festive mood as they behold the Great One, the firmly striding creator of feasts in the holy city, on that beautiful day of the
New Year . . .45

  According to Krupp,The heliacal rising of Sirius involves only a brief appearance of the star before it is lost in the light of the sun. The event is a union, or marriage, which, when consummated, recreates the world order by celebrating the sun’s ‘birthday’, the New Year. Certainly this astronomical event was watched from the roof of Dendera temple . . .46

  It was Norman Lockyer, however, who was the first to notice that the east-west axis of the small temple of Isis had an orientation of about 18° 30′ south-of-east, which, as we shall soon see, gave it a direct link to very important stellar targets. Typically Egyptologists had not bothered to check the orientation of the temple (or any other temple) because at the time they had assumed (wrongly) that all temples were simply meant to face the Nile without any other meaning to their orientations. In the region of Dendera, however, the Nile takes a sharp turn westwards from its normal northerly flow. From Dendera it thus runs east to west for about 20 kilometres before resuming its south-north flow near the town of Nag Hammadi. Between Dendera and Gebel Law the Nile runs roughly at 18° south-of-west, which means that someone standing at the eastern gate of the Dendera complex and facing the temple of Isis would be looking in its direction of flow. Lockyer had a strong hunch that this unique orientation had something to do with the rising of Sirius at the time the temple was built. Indeed, calculations shows that in 54 BC - the date of the founding of the Ptolemaic temple - Sirius rose at 18° 30′ south-of-east and thus was in alignment with the axis of the temple of Isis.47 Lockyer’s conclusion was that ‘the temple of Isis at Denderah was built to watch it [Sirius]’.48