34
Wells, op. cit. p. 255.
35
Ibid., pp. 258-62. Wells also discovered that the temple had other alignments to Orion’s belt as well as the Big Dipper (the thigh). According to Wells, ‘it is evident that Orion also crossed the traverse axis of the temple . . . the axial positions were computed for the star called Alnilam (ε Orionis), the middle star of the “belt” ’. Wells discovered that the designers of the temple seem to have intended to demarcate the two extreme variations of the Big Dipper constellation as it revolved around the north celestial pole. This is most intriguing, for we recall how other religious structures going back to the Old Kingdom were also linked to the star Sirius, Orion and the constellation of the Big Dipper, notably the Djoser complex at Saqqara and the Great Pyramid at Giza.
36
Extreme sceptics have argued that the succession of ancient surveyors were not aware that the older axis was not anymore directed to Sirius and simply oriented the new temple’s axis without being conscious of the change. This may perhaps be possible had there been only one change in axis orientation. But the original axis was changed several times. Also, since the ancient surveyors must have known that the temple was dedicated to Satet, goddess of the flood, which in turn was linked to the heliacal rising of Sirius, this argument is simply untenable.
37
‘The word
Hwt
(“Hat”) . . . was used in the New Kingdom with the meaning “Temple”. Jaroslav Cerny, ‘The Temple as an abbreviated name for the Temple of Medinet Habu’,
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
, Vol. 26, 1940, p. 127.
38
Krupp op. cit., p. 258.
39
Malek and op. cit., p. 112.
40
Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock,
Keeper of Genesis
, Heinemann, 1996, pp. 208-214.
41
Heinrich Brugsch, 1891,
Thesaurus Inscriptionum Aegyptiacarum
p. 189 quoted by Lockyer, op. cit., pp. 204-5.
42
Auguste Mariette,
Denderah
, Vol
.
I, 1875, pp. 142 and 263.
43
Although we have shown that Horus was identified to Sirius in the Pyramid Texts (
c
. 2300 BC), from the Eighteenth Dynasty (
c.
1500 BC) Sirius became identified to his mother the goddess Isis. See, ‘Sirius, Etoile et Jeune Horus’, op. cit., p. 64, n.14.
44
Krupp, op. cit., p. 257.
47
Lockyer, op. cit., p. 193. Lockyer actually took
in situ
measurements and concluded that the alignment of the temple of Isis was 18° 30′; this was also roughly the average of the measurements obtained earlier by Lepsius and Mariette.
48
Lockyer, op. cit., p. 200.
49
Lockyer’s calculations that the main temple was aligned to the star Dubhe (Alpha Ursa Major), the brightest star in the ‘thigh’ constellation, were based on very early dates which do not apply to the existing temple.
50
These drawings can be seen in Zaba,
L’Orientation Astronomique dans L’Ancienne Egypte et la Precession de l’Axe du Monde
, op. cit.
51
Mariette,
Dendera
, p. 206; see also Lockyer,
The Dawn of Astronomy
op. cit., p. 194.
53
Sylvie Cauville-Colin, ‘Le Temple d’Isis à Dendera’,
Bulletin de la Société Français D’Egyptologie
(BSFE), Vol. 123, March 1992, pp. 31-48.
54
John A. West,
Serpent in the Sky
, Quest Books, 1993, p. 103.
55
Wilkinson, op. cit., p. 37.
56
With the exception of the Great Sphinx, whose age is still an open question for researchers.
57
Henri Frankfort,
Kingship and the Gods
, University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 4.
58
Jane B. Sellers,
The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt
, Penguin, 1992, p. 94.
59
David O’Connor, ‘The Interpretation of the Old Kingdom Pyramid Complex’, H. Guksch & D. Polz (eds)
Stazionen: Beiträge Zur Kulturgesschicte Agyptens
, Rainer Stadelmann Gewidmet, Mainz, 1998.
Chapter Five: The Return of the Phoenix
1
Such terminology is still in use today. Thus when you travel from Cairo to Luxor, you are said to be going from Lower Egypt to Upper Egypt.
2
Edwards,
The Pyramids of Egypt
, op. cit., p. 3.
3
Michael A. Hoffman,
Egypt Before the Pharaohs
, Ark, 1984, p. 289.
4
Verner, op. cit., p. 16.
5
Malek and Baines, op. cit., p. 31.
6
Frankfort, op. cit., p. 24.
7
Miriam Lichtheim,
Ancient Egyptian Literature
, Vol. 1, University of California Press, 1975, p. 52.
9
Frankfort, op. cit., p. 24.
10
Lichtheim, op. cit., pp. 52-3.
11
Samuel Mercer,
The Religion of Ancient Egypt
, London, 1949, p. 331.
12
Lockyer, op. cit., p. 345.
13
Ron Wells, ‘The Mythology of Nut and the Birth of Ra’,
Studien zur Altagyptischen Kultur (SAK)
, Band 19, Vol. 19, 1992, pp. 303-21.
14
Dupuydt,
Civil and Lunar Calendars in Ancient Egypt
, op. cit., p. 62.
16
Lockyer, op. cit., Preface. On this matter Lockyer also wrote: ‘My lectures, given in November, 1890, were printed in
Nature
, April-July, 1891, under the title “On some Points in the Early History of Astronomy”, with the following note: “From shorthand notes of a course of lectures to working men delivered at the Museum of Practical Geology, Jermyn Street, in November, 1890. The notes were revised by me at Aswan during the month of January. I have found, since my return from Egypt in March, that part of the subject-matter of the lectures had been previously discussed by Professor Nissen, who has employed the same materials as myself. To him, therefore, so far as I at present know, belongs the credit of having first made the suggestion that ancient temples were oriented on an astronomical basis. His articles are to be found in the
Rheinisches Museum für Philologie
, 1885.” ’
17
At the Royal College of Science, South Kensington, now part of Imperial College.
18
Lockyer served as the editor of
Nature
until his death in 1920.
19
A astronomical observatory and radio station owned by the East Devon District Council and operated by The Norman Lockyer Observatory Society.
20
It would not be until 1981, nearly a century after Lockyer, that professional astronomers recognised archaeoastronomy as a ‘truly international’ branch of science at the First Oxford International Conference in Archaeoastronomy (see Krupp, op. cit., Foreword).
21
There were two brothers, Heinrich and Emile Brugsch. As both were given the title of ‘Bey’, I cannot be sure which of the two brothers Lockyer met in 1891. Heinrich was 64 at that time, and Emile was 49. Emile was at the time assistant curator at the Cairo Museum. A decade earlier, in 1881, he had made a name for himself for having saved the haul of royal mummies found at Deir el Bahari in Upper Egypt by bringing them to Cairo. That same year Emile had also been part of the exploration team under Gaston Maspero who discovered the Pyramid Texts at Saqqara. Lockyer refers to various publications by ‘Brugsch Bey’, so I should think that it was Heinrich Brugsch that he met in Cairo.
22
Heinrich Brugsch, ‘Astronomical and Astrological Inscriptions on Ancient Egyptian Monuments’, trans. by George Chamberlain from
Thesaurus Inscriptionum Aegyptiacarum
, by Heinrich Brugsch, Vol. 1, 1883. The English translation was originally published as a series of 18 articles (from April 1978 to January 1980) in the monthly journal, the
Griffith Observer
(published by the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles).
23
It was not until the formation of the
Services des Antiquitées
in Cairo in 1856 by Auguste Mariette that some form of official control was put into place to preserve ancient sites.
24
Lockyer, op. cit., pp. 98-106.
25
Today the axis of the Karnak temple would no longer be aligned precisely with the rising and setting sun at the two solstices because of the so-called
Milkovitch Factor
. In very simple terms the sun appears to oscillate to and fro from about 22° to about 24.4° in a period of about 40,000 years. Today the earth’s axis has a declination (is tilted to the plain of the ecliptic) of 23°27′ but when Karnak was built it was nearly 24°.
26
Gerald Hawkins,
Beyond Stonehenge
, Arrow, 1977, p. 206.
27
Luc Gabolde, ‘Brèves Communicotions’,
Revue d’Egyptologie
, Vol. 50, 1999, p. 278.
28
I witnessed this effect on the 21st June 2003 (see plates).
29
Gerald Hawkins did not carry out actual astronomical observations at Karnak at the winter solstice, but rather obtained the orientation angle from survey maps at the Franco-Egyptian research centre at Luxor and, like Lockyer before him, calculated the position of the sunrise at the solstice rather than observe it. However, a few years later the astronomer Ed Krupp confirmed Hawkins’s values from actual observations. The observations were carried out at the east end of the Karnak temple from the so-called ‘High Room of the Sun’ located on the north-east corner (Krupp, op. cit., pp. 253-7).
30
Hawkins, op. cit., p. 205.
31
See Raymond Weill,
Bases, Methods et Resultants de la Chronologie Egyptienne
, Paris, 1926, pp. 121-2.
32
Marshall Clagett,
Ancient Egyptian Science, Vol. II, Calendars, Clocks and Astronomy,
American Philosophical Society, 1995, Fig. III. 6a.
33
Abdel Mohsen Bakir
,
‘The Cairo Calendar of Lucky and Unlucky Days (Journal d’Entrée, no. 86637)’,
Annales du Service des Antiquités de L’Egypte
, Vol. 48, 1948, pp. 425-31.
34
Clagett, op. cit., p. 136, n. 25.
36
Belmonte, op. cit., p. 36. The difference between my date of 2028 BC and Belmonte’s date of 2004 BC is because he dates the inauguration of the civil calendar 2757 BC, which is the lower estimate in his calculations, rather than the accepted 2781 BC.
37
In the so-called ‘golden Horus’ name of Akhenaten (Aldred,
Akhenaten,
op. cit., p. 89).
38
Redford,
Akhenaten,
op. cit.
,
p. 133.
39
Ibid., op. cit., p. 95.
40
Leo Dupuydt, ‘On the consistency of the wandering year as backbone of Egyptian Chronology’,
Journal of the American Research Centre in Egypt (JARCE)
, Vol. XXXII, 1995, pp. 45-6.
41
W.M. Flinders Petrie,
Researches in Sinai
, John Murray, London, 1906 p. 177: ‘In the great festival of the renewal of a Sothic period in 139 AD, the signs of the months are prominent on the coins of Alexandria.’ For the possible celebrations in the year 1321 BC see Dupuydt, ‘On the consistency of the wandering year’, op. cit., p. 46.
42
Gurshtein, ‘The Great Pyramids of Egypt as Sanctuaries Commemorating the Origin of the Zodiac: An Analysis of Astronomical Evidence’, op. cit., p. 229.
43
Gurshtein, ‘The evolution of the Zodiac in the context of ancient oriental history’, op. cit., pp. 515-16.