Clearly the term ‘Horus is the Star’ is the same as Horus-
spd
, i.e. Horus-Sirius. Could the Step Pyramid complex, then, be a sort of architectural symbol of Sirius and its special cycles?
How?
Why?
The Egyptian Phoenix: the Harbinger of Good Tidings
‘Ultimately,’ wrote the astronomer R.W. Stoley, ‘our clocks are really timed by the stars. The master-clock is our earth, turning on its axis relative to the fixed stars.’
42
Stoley, of course, is telling us that we often tend to forget that time is not the moving hands on a wristwatch or the flipping of a sheet of a calendar hung on a kitchen wall, but the actual observation of the majestic movement of the celestial canopy around the earth. And the astronomer Edwin Krupp also reminds us that ‘celestial aligned architecture and celestially timed ceremonies tell us our ancestors watched the sky accurately and systematically.’
43
It should now be obvious that the Step Pyramid complex was ingeniously designed with a celestially aligned architecture in mind to service ‘celestially timed ceremonies’ most probably to do with the star Sirius. The scale of the complex, however, should also compel us to consider not merely the yearly cycle of this star, but also its longer cycle of 1,460 years. This long cycle is known as the Sothic cycle and as we have seen earlier is caused by the quarter-day ‘slippage’ per year of the civil calendar in relation to the heliacal rising of Sirius.
44
In AD 239 the Roman chronologist Censorinus wrote that
The beginnings of these years are always reckoned from the first day of that month which is called by the Egyptians Thoth, which happened this year upon the 7th of the kalends of July [25 June]. For a hundred years ago from the present year the same fell upon the 12th of the kalends of August [21 July], on which day Canicula [Sirius] regularly rises in Egypt.
45
What Censorinus was saying in so many words was that a Sothic cycle began on 21 July AD 139, when 1 Thoth of the civil calendar (I Akhet 1), which was the first day of the new year, coincided with the heliacal rising of Sirius. A quick check with StarryNight Pro. V.4 confirms that this statement is correct. Sirius did rise heliacally on 21 July according to the Julian calendar in the year AD 139 as witnessed from the city of Alexandria, from where the observation was most probably made, since it was the capital city of Egypt at that time and the seat of learning and calendrical time-keeping.
46
Censorinus has thus provided future chronologists with an anchorage point from which other Sothic cycles could be determined by subtracting increments of 1,460 years starting from the year AD 139. This gives us the dates of 1321 BC, 2781 BC, 4241 BC and so forth for the start of Sothic cycles. It follows, therefore, that the Egyptian civil calendar
must
have started at one of these dates. We can immediately discount the date 1321 BC because the calendar was operational much earlier, as confirmed by the Pyramid Texts. Most Egyptologists accept 2781 BC as the starting point of the Egyptian calendar. Few, if any, are willing to consider the previous date of 4241 BC because, in the words of one chronologist, Marshall Clagett, the Egyptians were ‘at an underdeveloped level of sophistication’.
47
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 that
Underlying 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 that: ‘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.