Black Genesis (28 page)

In the many years that we have investigated the astronomical alignments of Egyptian pyramids and temples, it has often occurred to us that there may be more than just a religious purpose in fixing the axes toward the rising stars or the sun. If we attribute a knowledge of precessional astronomy to the ancient builders—and recent studies have shown that there is much reason to
do so
⁴²
—then it is quite possible that these ancient megalith builders may have used their monuments for long-term calendric computations in order to hark backward to distant epochs that had special significance to them. Further, this stretching the cord ceremony may well have been a ritual to verify, upon inauguration of a new temple building site, that the stars in the heavens were continuing to operate as the astronomer-priests expected they should, and so the earthly and heavenly events could be unified in the temple to maintain sacred order. Indeed, as we have seen in chapter 4, all the signatures of the precursor to the stretching the cord ceremony were present at Nabta Playa, even if it was not the same ritual itself.

Yet there is more evidence that Old Kingdom temples were in fact encoded with sophisticated calendar functions, but to verify this we must first grasp the essential features of the ancient Egyptian calendar and how it may have been applied to such a lofty purpose.

THE TIME MACHINE OF THE ANCIENTS

Today we need not have years of direct observations of the night sky to be initiated into this ancient system of astral knowledge, for with the use of sophisticated astronomy software such as StarryNightPro plus a common home computer, we can speed up the cycles of the celestial bodies to condense a year into a minute—or even, at the touch of a button, hop into the distant past or future. All it takes to operate such user-friendly software is basic knowledge of celestial mechanics and a keen interest in the sky. Nonetheless, we must consider the sky from the perspective of the ancient stargazers of Egypt, and for this we must understand how they computed short- and long-term cycles for their timekeeping needs.

A SENSE OF ETERNITY

The so-called civil calendar of ancient Egypt was a timekeeping device of elegant simplicity. It had the amazing benefit of requiring no adjustment as well as serving as a device for eternity. “The quest for Eternity,” wrote the French scholar Anne-Sophie von Bomhard, “was the most essential preoccupation of the Egyptian
civilization.”
⁴³
The ancient Egyptians sought eternity through understanding of the long-term cycles of the sun and stars. Everything the ancient Egyptians did—all monuments they built, all ceremonies and rituals they performed, all art and writings they created—were inspired by the idea of eternity and how they could become part of it. We need only look at the pyramids to feel their inspiration.

Yet if the pyramids are a monumental legacy to eternity, then surely the ever-flowing Nile and its annual flood are the living expression of it. Herodotus said that Egypt was “the gift of the Nile,” and the Egyptians themselves saw the Nile as a sacred river, which had its source in heaven among the
stars.
⁴⁴
The Egyptologist Jean Kerisel writes, “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.”
⁴⁵

The source of the Nile is the great lakes in the distant south, thousand of kilometers away, in central Africa and Ethiopia. As we have seen, the annual flood is the direct product of the heavy monsoon rains that occur in midsummer, which cause these great lakes to overflow and discharge their waters into the Nile. These very same monsoons once reached the south of Egypt and created temporary lakes such as the one at Nabta Playa. According to standard Egyptology, however, the ancient Egyptians never knew this. Indeed, the source of the Nile—and thus the cause of the annual flood—were not known to modern humans until the late nineteenth century. Given our new evidence, however, we can question to what extent we can say that the ancient Egyptians never knew that the monsoon flooding in the south was the source of the annual Nile floods. Perhaps the ancient Egyptians did not know as we today think of knowing, but in addition to the astronomical evidence, their origin stories suggest they did have some sort of awareness.

The ancient Egyptians represented the Nile as the god Hapy
,
a plump man with drooping breasts and a belly that implied contentment and fulfillment. They imagined that its source was a cave leading into the underworld, the Duat. Yet the Duat was also a starry world near the Milky Way. The Lord of the Duat was the god Osiris, with whom the dead pharaohs were identified. Thus according to the Egyptologist J. Gwyn Griffiths, “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 . . .”
⁴⁶
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.”
⁴⁷
The seemingly contradictory fact that there was a celestial Duat and an underworld Duat can be explained by the observation of what actually happens in the sky: the stars journey in the sky after they rise from east to west, and they journey in the underworld—that is, below the horizon—from west to east, after they set. What added to this earth-sky connection for the Duat was the visible feature of a celestial Nile near Orion. As the historian and astronomer Alan Chapman aptly puts it: “was not the life-giving Nile itself reflected in the very heavens themselves, in the form of the Milky
Way?”
⁴⁸
The American Egyptologist Mark Lehner also points out that “the Milky Way was the ‘beaten path of the stars,' although it was also a watery way. . . . In fact, the vision is that of the Nile Valley at
inundation.”
⁴⁹
Further, the mythologist Lucie Lamy adds: “If Egypt is a reflection of the sky, then divine beings sail on the waters of the Great River which animate the cosmos: the
Milky Way.”
⁵⁰
Robert Bauval had published the same idea in 1989 when he wrote, “a major feature of the After-world often mentioned in the Pyramid Texts is the ‘Winding Waterway,' which was, in all probability, seen as a celestial counterpart of the
Nile.”
⁵¹

THE SACRED YEARLY INUNDATION

Each year, the Nile started to swell in mid-June and spilled its water on the adjacent valley. Herodotus, who journeyed in Egypt in the fifth century BCE, commented: “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.”
⁵²

What Herodotus wanted to know, and what the Egyptians could not or would not tell him, was that the reason the Nile behaved in its mysterious way was because of the monsoon rains in the distant south, which, in a sense, regulate the flow and level of the river. Even after the monsoons receded south out of Egypt and the rains that had once drenched the dry Sahara each summer came to an end, much of the downpour of the rainwaters did, in fact, still reach Egypt via the Nile.

Like the Nabta Playa prehistoric stargazers before them who experienced monsoon rains, the ancient Egyptian astronomers could not help but notice that the annual arrival of the flood occurred when the sun rose at its most northerly position on the eastern horizon—that is, at summer solstice. The common view among scholars is that this prompted the ancient stargazers of the Nile to count the number of days between each cycle, reaching the conclusion that it took 365 days
^*53
—a year—which furthermore made the summer solstice their New Year's Day.

If we observe sunrise from the same place each day, we can notice that the sun changes position along the eastern horizon between two extreme points: the summer solstice to the far left (north) of due east, and the winter solstice to the far right (south) of due east. At these two extreme points, the sun appears to be stationary for a week or so, hence the term
solstice,
from the Latin, which means “stationary sun.” In our modern Gregorian calendar, the summer solstice falls on June 21 and the winter solstice falls on December 21. The sun's journey from one solstice to the other and back takes 365 days, which we call one year. Most historians agree that this discovery was made first in Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE. As we have seen, however, the evidence now strongly suggests that the discovery was made much earlier, in the Egyptian Sahara, and was then imported into the Nile Valley by the Black people that traveled there from Nabta Playa. Admittedly, this discovery was probably refined a few centuries later—most likely, sometime around 2800 BCE—by the ancient Egyptians (by the sun priests of the Great Sun Temple at Heliopolis, near modern Cairo) to produce a sophisticated calendar with weeks and months.

Egyptian calendar divisions

The civil (Egyptian) calendar was divided in the following manner: twelve months of thirty days, with each month having three weeks, or decades, of ten days. The twelve months amounted to 360 days to which were 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: the first season, called Akhet, meaning “inundation,” from months 1 to 4; the second season, called Peret or Proyet, meaning “emergence” or “coming forth,” from months 5 to 8; and the third season, called Shemu, meaning “harvest,” from months 9 to 12. Originally, the months were not given names but were assigned only numbers from one to twelve. The first day of the first month of the first season was known as I Akhet—that is, month I, season Akhet, day 1. Later in the New Kingdom, the months received official names: (1) Thoth, (2) Phaopi, (3) Athyr, (4) Choiak, (5) Tybi, (6) Mechir, (7) Phamenoth, (8) Pharmuti, (9) Pachons, (10) Payni, (11) Epiphi, and (12) Mesore. Egyptologists and historians can never agree on the age of the Egyptian calendar. There is, however, much evidence to support the conclusion that the calendar was already in place during the Old Kingdom.

The solar (tropical) year is, in fact, longer than 365 days by a very small fraction, almost a quarter of a day. The exact value of the year is 365.2422 days. Today, to keep our modern Gregorian calendar synchronized with the seasons, we add one day every four years to the year, making the lengthened year what is known as a leap year. Evidence suggests that even though the ancient Egyptians were aware of this shift, they did not have a leap year but simply let their calendar drift relative to the seasons. This, by necessity, created a long-range cycle of 1,460 years—(365 × 4 = 1,460)—and can be seen as a Great Solar Cycle. It so happens that the ancients also observed the rising of stars, and they chose the heliacal rising of Sirius as a marker of the New Year. This means that their civil calendar New Year also drifted relative to the astronomical Sirius New Year at the rate of one day every four years, creating the same cycle of 1,460 years, which scholars call the Sothic cycle (because Sothis is the ancient name for Sirius).
⁵³
The peculiarity of the annual cycle of Sirius (or indeed any star that rises and sets) is that it will seem to disappear for a period of time—that is, it is hidden from view (because the star is up only in daylight). This period was about seventy days in the case of Sirius in ancient Egypt, after which it reappeared at dawn in the east. This first reappearance at dawn is known as the heliacal rising. The heliacal rising of Sirius was significant to the ancient Egyptians for two reasons: it took place near the summer solstice and also appeared at the start of the flood
season.
⁵⁴

The Heliacal Rising of Sirius

The rising time of stars is delayed by nearly four minutes each day. If we watch Sirius's rising in early August, the rising will be at dawn. In late October, the rising is at midnight. Sirius's rising in early January is at dusk. There is a period from late January to late May in which Sirius has already risen in daylight and seems to emerge out of the sky as the dome darkens after sunset (that is, the sky becomes dark enough for us to see the spot of light that is Sirius). If we were at the Giza pyramids in early March and we looked due south at dusk, Sirius would emerge from the sky directly over the Great Pyramid. At one point in the year—in late May—Sirius can be seen hovering just over the western horizon after sunset. In the days that follow this, the star will not be seen anymore, because it is now too close to the sun's light for its own light to be seen. Sirius remains thus invisible for about seventy days, until August 5, when it rises anew before sunrise in the eastern horizon. This first dawn rising of Sirius is technically known as the heliacal rising of Sirius and was seen by the Egyptians as the rebirth of the star.