I became intrigued by this uncanny correlation, the more so because I found out that the kings of the Pyramid Age saw the region of Orion as being part of the celestial afterworld they called the Duat.
63
I also discovered that in 1964 two academics at UCLA had worked out that a shaft within the Great Pyramid had pointed towards Orion’s belt in
c.
2500 BC, when this pyramid was built. It took me 12 years to compile my research in a book, which was published in London in 1994. Backed by a BBC documentary, the book took off and shot to number 1 in the bestseller lists.
64
One particular point that I made in 1994 relevant to the present discussion was this: with the use of two illustrations showing the Plough and Orion, I demonstrated how the lower meridian transit of the Plough took place in the north at exactly the same time as the rising of Orion’s belt in the east. My conclusion was that the ancient surveyors had aimed the Great Pyramid at a star in the Plough not because it was at true north (although it did happen to be there at the time) but because it could be used as a time-marker to tell them precisely when Orion’s belt would be rising in the east. Their true focus of interest was not the northern sky per se, but the mechanism of the circumpolar stars as indicators of the rising of Orion’s belt in the east. In other words, it was Orion’s belt rising in the east that was their ultimate objective in aiming the pyramid at the star Kochab or Mizar (or both, as Spence has theorised) during their transit in the north. Thus the tiny misalignment that is registered in the orientation of the Great Pyramid was not, as Spence believed, due to the vertical misalignment of these two northern stars at ‘simultaneous transit’ but rather due to the fact that this was the orientation the priests wanted the structure to have in order for it be locked for ever in a time-frame (
c.
2500 BC) when Orion’s belt was rising (i.e. being ‘reborn’) in the east. In this way the Great Pyramid was tied ad infinitum to the date of Khufu’s ‘rebirth’, i.e. as an Osiris-Orion entity, by means of the mechanism of the stars. I now had a strong feeling that this reasoning would also prove correct for the ‘misalignment’ of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. In other words, was the rising of a star in the east the reason for the 4° 35′ ‘misalignment’ of the Step Pyramid at the attached
serdab
?
The Step Pyramid, as we have already seen, is generally dated to
c.
2650 BC, although most researchers will allow for a margin of uncertainty of 150 years either way. I had the orientation of the Step Pyramid from Dorner’s data. What I now needed was the exact angle of inclination of the
serdab
, and with this data I could work out which star in the Plough it was aimed at. In his latest book on the pyramids, Mark Lehner had stated that the
serdab
was tilted upwards by 13° towards the northern sky
.
65
Normally I would accept such a statement at face value, but I soon discovered that there was much confusion regarding the angle of tilt of the
serdab
. Jean-Philippe Lauer, deemed by many to be the supreme authority on the Step Pyramid, gives a much higher value than Lehner. In Lauer’s own words: ‘Two round holes drilled in the north face of the serdab, whose sides are inclined parallel to that of the Pyramid, allowed the statue to communicate with the outside world . . .
66
The slope of its faces is near 16° to the vertical . . .’
67
This same value of nearly 16° is given by Sir I.E.S. Edwards, another renowned expert on the pyramids. To complicate things further, the eminent French Egyptologist Jacques Vandier gives a value of 17°
68
. I realised that the only way to be sure was to measure the angle of tilt myself. The opportunity came along in July 2002. After several trials using a simple inclinometer with a plumb line and also a spirit level with a large protractor, I concluded that the angle of tilt was, in fact, very near 16°, as Lauer and Edwards had affirmed.
69
Reconstruction
Using the powerful astronomy programme StarryNight Pro v.4 (and Skymap Pro7 as a back-up) I punched in the latitude of the Step Pyramid: 29° 49′ N and 31° 15′ E. I then entered the date of 2650 BC. Within a few seconds I was looking at the ancient sky above the ‘newly built’ Step Pyramid. I then looked at the northern part of the sky and placed the cursor at azimuth 4° 35′ and then at 16° above the horizon line. I was now looking at the spot at which the
ka
statue in the
serdab
was gazing so intently. I then activated the sky at ×300 speed and waited. After several observations of the lower transits of the Plough, I was fairly sure that the star in question was Al Kaid, the ‘hoof’ star of
meskhetiu
, the bull’s thigh.
70
Trying a variety of dates within the +/- 150 years ranges, I was also relatively certain that the observation had been made near the date of 2800 BC. I now ‘froze’ the sky at this date and the precise moment Al Kaid aligned with the
serdab
, and directed my screen view to the east. There it was, shining brighter than anything else in the horizon: the star of Horus was Sirius!
I suddenly remembered that the architect Imhotep, who had been responsible for the design of the Step Pyramid complex and, presumably, its astronomical alignments, had also been a high priest of Heliopolis. It was well known that Heliopolis was where regular observations of Sirius had been made since the beginning of Egyptian civilisation and that it was because of the timely rising of this star that the calendar had been invented at Heliopolis in around 2800 BC - the same date that was now highlighted on my computer screen. And although Heliopolis, it is true, was dedicated to the sun-god Ra, nonetheless, according to Professor I.E.S. Edwards:
Imhotep’s title ‘Chief of the Observers’, which became the regular title of the high priest of Heliopolis, may itself suggest an occupation connected with astral, rather than solar, observation . . . It is significant that the high priest of the centre of the sun-cult at Heliopolis bore the title ‘Chief of the Astronomers’ and was represented wearing a mantle adorned with stars.
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Did Imhotep study the various cycles of Sirius, ‘the star at the head’ of all the other stars in the sky? And did he incorporate these cycles into the overall design of the Step Pyramid complex?
To what end?
CHAPTER TWO
The Quest for Eternity
The Nile and its flooding were dominant factors in the newly formed
Egyptian state . . .
Jaromir Malek and John Baines,
The Cultural Atlas of the World:
Ancient Egypt
The importance of Sirius for the Egyptians lay in the fact that the star’s annual appearance on the eastern horizon at dawn heralded the approximate beginning of the Nile’s annual inundation which marked the beginning of the agricultural year . . .
R.H. Wilkinson,
The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt
The Egyptian year was considered to begin on 19 July (according to the later Julian calendar) which was the date of the heliacal rising of the dog star Sirius . . .
Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson,
The British Museum Dictionary of
Ancient Egypt
The Egyptians . . . were the first to discover the solar year, and to portion out its course into twelve parts. They obtained this knowledge from the stars
.
Herodotus,
The Histories
, Book II
A Sense of Eternity
‘The quest for Eternity,’ wrote the French scholar Anne-Sophie Bomhard, ‘was the most essential preoccupation of the Egyptian civilisation.’
1
This is a bit of an understatement. The quest for eternity was the
raison d’être
of the Egyptian civilisation. Everything they did, every monument they built, every ceremony, every ritual, every writing was directly or indirectly inspired by the idea of eternity and how to connect with it. And if one needs reminding, then all one has to do is look at the pyramids of Giza.
2
Nothing else can really explain their brooding presence. But if the pyramids are symbols to eternity, then its very manifestation must surely be the never-ending flow of the River Nile and, perhaps even more so, its cyclical flood. The fifth century BC historian Herodotus called Egypt ‘the gift of the Nile’. The Egyptians themselves went a lot further. They claimed that their sacred river had its source in heaven among the stars.
3
As the distinguished French Egyptologist Jean Kerisel so aptly put it, ‘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’.
4
The source of the Nile lies in the distant south, 4,000 kilometres into the heartland of Africa. But the ancient Egyptians never knew this. Indeed, the whereabouts of the source of the Nile - and thus the cause of the yearly flood - was not known to modern man until the late nineteenth century. It was towards this mysterious distant south, therefore, that the ancient Egyptians directed their attention, watching and waiting for the life-giving flood to come each year. As the British astronomer Allan Chapman explained, the Nile ‘ran very largely from south to north, almost down the meridian, so that when one looked south, astronomical bodies always rose to the left from the desert, culminated to the meridian above the Nile, and set to the right beyond the western desert.’
5
Similar views are expressed by the American Egyptologist John A. Wilson who wrote that
. . . (the Egyptian) took his orientation from the Nile River, the source of all life. He faced the south, from which the stream came. One of the terms for ‘south’ is also the term for ‘face’; the usual word for ‘north’ is probably related to a word which means ‘the back of the face’. On his left was the east and on his right the west. The word for ‘east’ and ‘left’ is the same and the word for ‘west’ and ‘right’ is the same.
6
In ancient Egypt the Nile was sacred, represented as a god with drooping breasts and a belly gorged with food and drink. The Egyptians believed with intense fervour that the Nile had its source not on earth but in some deep cavernous region of the underworld. Yet the underworld itself, as many of the ancient texts imply, was an interface with the world of the stars. It was called the Duat, and as many Egyptologists have demonstrated, there was an underworld Duat as well as a starry Duat. For example, J. Gwyn Griffiths informs us that ‘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 . . .’
7
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.’
8
But the celestial Duat and the underworld Duat were probably one and the same thing to the Egyptians. This can be explained by the observation that stars set (enter the underworld) in the western horizon each day and emerge twelve hours later in the east. In other words, they journey for half the day in the underworld and the other half in the sky above. But to the Egyptians the Nile not only had its source in the starry Duat, its yearly cycle of the flood mirrored the cycle of the stars. There was, however, a more visible feature in the sky that added to this earth-sky correlation: ‘Was not the life-giving Nile itself,’ points out the astronomer Alan Chapman, ‘reflected in the very heavens themselves, in the form of the Milky Way?’
9
Speaking of the ‘celestial world and underworld’, Mark Lehner wrote:
Indeed, the sky had banks or levees on the west and in the east. The Milky Way was the ‘beaten path of the stars’, although it was also a watery way. Two fields were prominent in the sky, the Field of Reeds, a rather marshy area on the eastern edge, and the Field of Offerings further north near the Imperishable Ones. In fact, the vision is that of the Nile Valley at inundation.
10
There can be little doubt that to the ancient Egyptians the shimmering white band of starry light we call the Milky Way was the celestial Nile on which the gods navigated. ‘If Egypt is a reflection of the sky,’ wrote the mythologist Lucy Lamie, ‘then divine beings sail on the waters of the Great River which animate the cosmos: the Milky Way’.
11