44
Belmonte, op. cit., p. 37.
45
Hassan,
Sphinx
, op. cit., pp. 184-5. See also Aldred,
Akhenaten
, op. cit., p. 142.
46
Redford, op. cit., p. 20.
47
According to Cyril Aldred: ‘At the death of the sardonic old warrior Amenophis II (Amenhotep II), his son the youth Tuthmosis, Menkheperure, succeeded to the throne of Horus. He may have been preceded by an elder brother who served his father as co-regent but died before he could come into his own. Tuthmosis IV attributed his good fortune to the sponsorship of the supreme god of Lower Egypt, Re-Horakhti, who in a dream promised him the crown if he would clear away the sands that engulfed his giant image of the Sphinx at Giza . . . intervention at the highest level is seen in the undertaking of Tuthmosis IV to uncover the giant image of Re-Horakhti, the god of Lower Egypt, from the sand that engulfed his great sphinx at Giza’ (Aldred,
Akhenaten, King of Egypt
, op. cit., p. 142).
48
The author Ahmed Osman is the originator of this hypothesis. See Ahmed Osman,
Moses and Akhenaten
, Bear & Company, Vermont, 2002.
49
Aldred,
Akhenaten,
op. cit., pp. 25, 67.
50
Rosalie David,
The Cult of the Sun
, J.M. Dent, London, 1980, p. 187. See also Alexandre Moret,
Alexander: Kings and Gods of Egyp
t, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1912, p. 52.
51
George Hart,
A Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddess
, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988, p. 42.
52
Hermann Schlogl, ‘Aten’, in
The Ancient Gods Speak
, op. cit., p. 23.
53
Redford gives 1377 BC (
Akhenaten
, op. cit.), but Malek and J. Baines give 1353 BC, which seems to be generally accepted by most Egyptologists (
The Cultural Atlas of the World: Ancient Egypt
, op. cit.).
54
Redford, op. cit., p. 144.
Chapter Six: Lord of Jubilees
1
There is a scarab of Amenhotep III with this title, see William M. Flinders Petrie,
Historical Scarabs
, London, 1899, Pl. 40, no. 1263 (British Museum Catalogue BM 16912).
2
It was on this particular tour that I met Sandro Mainardi from Florence who kindly produced the graphics for this book.
3
B.J. Kemp and S. Garfi,
A Survey of the Ancient City of El-’Amarna
, The Egypt Exploration Society, London, 1993, p. 10.
6
Kemp and Garfi, op. cit., Map Sheets 4 and 5.
7
Aldred,
Akhenaten,
op. cit., p. 15.
9
Redford,
Akhenaten,
op. cit., pp. 172-3.
10
Ibid., p. 180. Apparently the king also bore that title, David, op cit., p. 187. Also Moret, op. cit., p. 52.
11
Arthur Weigall,
Life and Times of Akhenaton
,
Pharoah of Egpyt
, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1923, p. 63.
12
It may be worth perhaps mentioning that also in the year 1360 BC, when Akhenaten moved the court to Tell el Amarna, Halley’s Comet was making its reappearance in the eastern sky at dawn - perhaps seen as the cosmic phoenix returning to Heliopolis?
13
Redford, op. cit., p. 139.
14
Very rarely a small cobra was also included, (the so-called
uraeus
) at the bottom of the solar disc.
15
Wilkinson, op. cit., p. 212.
16
Redford, op. cit., p. 139. Redford translates
zep tepi
as ‘First Occasion, i.e. the first moment of creation’.
17
Jocelyn Gohary,
Akhenaten’s Sed-Festival at Karnak
, Kegan Paul International, London, 1992, pp. 29-30.
18
Gohary, op. cit., p. 29.
19
It means ‘three’ in Arabic, but could also be from the Italian word
tagliati
(cuttings), which makes more sense.
20
Francis Llewellyn Griffith, ‘The Jubilee of Akhenaten’,
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
, Vol. 5, 1918, p. 62.
21
Gohary,
Akenaten’s Sed-Festival at Karnak
, op. cit., p. 32.
23
Inscription on the First Boundary Stone, 13th Day, 4th Month, 2nd Season, 6th Year.
24
Griffith, op. cit., p. 62.
26
Quirke, op. cit., p. 154.
27
Gohary, op. cit., pp. 2-3.
28
Redford, op. cit., p. 146.
29
Gohary, op. cit., p. 4.
31
This was during the Stars & Signs II Egypt Tour, which I organise with Quest Travel every year.
32
The Sphinx measures 15 metres in height. Another of Rameses’ statues which lies on its back at Mit’Rahin (Memphis) would have been 18 metres high when upright.
33
The statue is also said to be a cryptograph of Rameses II’s ‘coronation name’
User-maat-re
.
34
Baines and Malek, op. cit., p. 184.
36
H. te Velde, ‘Some Remarks on the Mysterious Language of the Baboons’,
Essays Dedicated to Prof. M.S.H.G. Heerma van Voss
, University of Amsterdam, Kampen 1988, p. 129.
37
J.M.A. Janssen,
Hieogliefen
, E.J. Brill Leiden, 1952, p. 7.
38
Jeane-Claude Goyon ‘Textes Mythologiques II’,
Bulletin de L’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale
(
BIFAO)
, Vol. 75, 1975, p. 376.
39
Jan K. van der Haagen, ‘Au Grand Temple D’ Abou Simbel: Le Secret des Pretres et des Astronomes’,
Courier de l’Unesco
, October 1962.
40
Haagen, op. cit. It is interesting to note that an inscription carved on the cliff near the Abu Simbel temple reads
Rameses-ashahebsed
, which translates as ‘Rameses-Rich-in-Jubilees’. Egyptologists attribute this to an official of the king’s inner circle also called Rameses who was in charge of the construction of the temple (See T.G.H. James,
Ramesses the Great
, The American University Press in Cairo, 2002, p. 177).
41
There was something else worth mentioning in the astronomical alignment of the temple that caught the attention of the Belgian astronomer Professor M. Bonneval, a colleague of Haagen. The latter discovered that in
c
. 1260 BC, when construction work on the temple was probably started, another more frequent celestial spectacle would have been seen at night from late May to early December: the three bright stars of Orion’s belt rising over the eastern cliffs in direct alignment with the axis of the temple. Haagen thus wrote: ‘We know that Orion, or more precisely the three belt stars, played an important role for the Egyptians . . . And it also is known from various texts that Orion (Sah in ancient Egyptian) was assimilated to Osiris, god of resurrection.’ (Haagen, op. cit.)
42
Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), however, was so convinced of Haagen’s conclusions that when the Abu Simbel temple was moved to a higher location in the mid-1960s it was aligned to the 22 October sunrise, the so-called ‘Festival of the Sun’.
43
We have seen how the ancient Egyptians were particularly taken by the belief that there had been a ‘First Time’ from which the perpetual cycle of the sun-god had begun and which they calculated returned to its point of origin every 1,460 years. But in actual fact it takes 1,506 years for the civil calendar to re-coincide exactly. We have also seen how the point of origin was fixed at the summer solstice, which today falls on 21 June. It is my contention, therefore, that a ‘super’ jubilee was celebrated at those points of return, one of which would have been in
c
. 1275 BC. In that year, the ‘jubilee date’ of 1 Tybi would fall 120 days after the summer solstice, which is 19 October. The Great Temple of Rameses II at Abu Simbel may, indeed, be a memorial to such an event. Supporting this hypothesis is the name that was occasionally given to the jubilees, such as the
zep tepi heb-sed
and also the
zep tepi whmw heb-sed
, which respectively translate as ‘the First Time Jubilee’, and ‘the First Time Return Jubilee’. (See Flinders Petrie, op. cit., p. 180. See also Patrick F. O’Mara, ‘Was the Sed Festival Periodic in Early Egyptian History?’,
Discussions in Egyptology
, Vol. 12, 1988, p. 55).
44
At this latitude the shift over 5,000 years would be practically unnoticeable to a naked-eye observer.
45
The Sphinx faces due east, but the causeway is oriented some 13 to 14° south-of-east. Calculations show that the sunrise would be at 13° south-of-east on 21 February and also on 19 October.
46
Colin Reader, ‘Giza Before the Fourth Dynasty’,
Journal of the Ancient Chronology Forum
, Vol. 9, pp. 5-21.
47
Malek and Baines, op. cit., p. 36.
48
Mark Lehner, ‘Giza: A Contextual Approach to the Pyramids’,
Archiv. Für Orientforschung
, Vol. 32, 1985, pp. 136-159.
50
Jeremy Naydler,
Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts
, Inner Traditions Publishing, Rochester, Vermont, 2005, pp. 71-122.
51
Ibid., p. 99, Fig. 4.11.
52
Ibid., p. 103, Fig. 4.15.
53
Wilkinson, op. cit., p. 239.
54
Kemp and Garfi, op. cit., Map Sheets 4 and 5.
55
Roel Oostra’s TV documentary is being made for the Dutch channel AVRO and the Italian channel RAI II.
Conclusion
1
Pyramid Texts, Utterance 600.
2
Due to precession, a star will also rise at a different position on the eastern horizon over a long period of time, and will return back to the original position every 26,000 years (but allowing a small difference due to the proper motion of the star).
3
Wilkinson, op cit., pp. 77-9.
4
E.A. Wallis Budge,
The Egyptian Heaven and Hell: The Book of What Is in the Duat
, Vol.1, Martin Hopkinson & Co., London, 1925, pp. 240, 258.
Appendix 1: Running the Heb Sed
1
G. Wainwright,
The Sky Religion in Egypt
(Cambridge, 1938), pp. 16-17.
3
Jocelyn Gohary,
Akhenaten’s Sed-Festival at Karnak
(London, 1992), p. 2. This is an excellent survey of the different theories about the
Sed
-festival, with a very complete biography on the subject.
4
The major works on the
Heb-Sed
are essential references to understanding its complexities. They are: C.M. Firth and J.E. Quibell,
The Step Pyramid
(2 vols.) (Cairo 1935); F.W. von Bissing and H. Kees,
Das Re-Heiligtum des Konigs Newoser-Re II and III
(Leipzig, 1923 and 1928); and E. Naville,
The Festival Hall of Osorkon II in the Great Temple of Bubastis
(London, 1892).