Black Genesis (3 page)

Reconstructing the Calendar Circle

There has been a certain amount of controversy as to what exactly happened during and after the reconstruction of the circle (called the Calendar Circle) at Nabta Playa. In June 2008 the authors contacted Dr. Zedeño and asked her if, because there appeared to have been much tampering with the Calendar Circle (especially in 2007–2008), she might help work out what happened from the time the circle was discovered (in 1974) to the publication of Malville‘s article in
Nature
in 1998. it was noted to Dr. Zedeño that in February 2008 the Calendar Circle was removed from its original place at Nabta Playa and transported to the Nubian Museum in Aswan.

Dr. Zedeño replied in a personal corresponence to Robert Bauval: “I mapped the calendar in the winter of 1991–1992. I never saw it again, or before that date for that matter, so I don't know what happened to it. No idea what the cow stone is or where it was before it was removed. Some photos do not seem to be of the same site, in fact there seems to be a fake calendar photo here and there. . . . The only authoritative publication about the calendar I know of is a chapter in Wendorf, Schild, and associates. . . .” As Dr. Zedeño indicates, she mapped the circle in 1991 and 1992, whereas Schild said he made the first map in 1992. Also, Zedeño suggests that the only authoritative paper she knows is a chapter in the publication of Wendorf et al., which is in fact an article by Zedeño herself and a colleague, Alex Applegate, published in 2001. She ignores the 1998 publication in
Nature
by Wendorf and Malville. We are not sure what “fake calendar” she refers to. Furthermore, Zedeño says she never saw the Calendar Circle before 1991 or after 1992 and therefore does not know what happened to it. yet in her 2001 article coauthored with Applegate, she writes: “However, one should note that since the time of the site's original discovery [1973], only eight of the presumed fourteen upright slabs remain in place, while the other six center slabs have fallen. In addition, the presumed outer ring suffered an even greater displacement with one of the stones deposited over 7 meters [about 23 feet] from its postulated
position.”
⁶
To confuse things even further, in an e-mail message we received from Romuald Schild on June 12, 2008, “The first field map of the calendar was made by dr. Zedeño and Schild in February 1992, while the first hypothetical reconstruction of the devise, including directions and angles of the sights (gates), was drawn by myself, also in February 1992.”

IN COMES ARCHAEOASTRONOMY

In the past forty years or so there has been a growing interest in the new scientific field of archaeoastronomy, which, according to one school of thought, is defined as the study of the astronomies, astrologies, and cosmologies, as well as the alignments of monuments and buildings of ancient cultures. This scientific discipline has emerged as a new tool for archaeology, because it has become more apparent in recent years that the cyclical motions of the stars, sun, moon, and planets were very much an integral part of the religious ideologies of ancient cultures and that ancient peoples applied such ideas to the design and alignment of their monuments. It is thus imperative to bring in the science of naked-eye observational astronomy as a necessary instrument in order to understand fully the meaning of the design, alignments, and sometimes the choice of location of ancient temples, pyramids, and even whole cities. For example, according to E. C. Krupp:

The cosmos itself is what mattered to our ancestors. Their lives, their beliefs, their destinies—all were part of this bigger pageant. Just as the environment of their temples was made sacred by metaphors of cosmic order, entire cities and great ritual centres were also astronomically aligned and organised. Each sacred capital restated the theme of cosmic order in terms of its builders' own perception of the universe. Principles, which the society considered its own—which ordered its life and gave it its character—were borrowed from the sky and built into the plans of the
cities.
⁷

A sort of stillborn precursor of modern archaeoastronomy can be found in the turbulent intellectual milieu that swirled through the French intelligentsia at the turn of the nineteenth century after Napoleon, in 1799, took a cadre of top scientists and scholars along with his army on their adventurous military campaigns through Egypt. Napoleon also took along artists to record the journeys in sketches. One such artist, Vivant Denon, was fascinated by a zodiac sculpted onto the ceiling of a temple at Dendera. In Paris, Denon published as a book his sketch of the Dendera zodiac along with an account of his travels, and it became a huge bestseller in both France and England. In the important scientific and scholarly societies of Paris there arose a protracted and very active debate focusing on attempts to date the Dendera zodiac. One camp was composed of scientific luminaries of the time, many of whose names are familiar to any student of science today. These scientists often gathered at the home of the Marquis de LaPlace. Particularly active in the Dendera zodiac debate were physicists Jean-Baptiste Biot and Joseph Fourier, astronomer Johan Karl Burckhardt, and his engineer partner Jean-Baptiste Coraboeuf. The approach that all in this camp followed in order to attempt to date the zodiac was to match calculations of the astronomical precession of the equinoxes with the images of constellations on the Dendera zodiac. They followed the reasoning of pre–French Revolutionary scholar Charles Dupuis, who had based his study of the origins of religion on interpreting religious mythologies in astronomical terms. As California Institute of Technology historian of science Jed Z. Buchald puts it,

Dupuis had located the birthplace of the zodiac in an Egypt older by far than any chronology based on textual arguments—and especially on the Books of Moses—could possibly allow. (Standard biblical chronology placed the origin of all things at about 4000 BC. . . .) According to Dupuis, the zodiac, and astronomy itself, was born near the Nile over 14,000 years ago. The Greeks, he insisted, were scientific children compared to the Egyptians, whose knowledge and wisdom underlay all of Western science and
mathematics.
⁸

The scientists competed fiercely, often disagreeing with each other. For example, Biot seems to have enjoyed pointing out that Fourier, famous for his mathematics, had miscalculated the heliacal rising of Sirius. Yet they all used precession calculations to date the Dendera zodiac. One thing that hampered them and that is still uncertain today was that it is not clear how much of the Dendera zodiac is representative of actual events in the sky and how much of it is merely symbolic horoscope. This gets at the heart of the other camp in the zodiac-dating debates of the time: the philologists and linguists who argued that astrophysical calculations should not be applied, because all ancient symbology is best understood as an expression of the cultural lives of the ancients, not as a representation of the physical world.

Stirring even more the turbulence of the debate was that many French intellectuals, such as Dupuis, had little use for biblical fundamentalism, while others believed all scholarship should be firmly based on interpreting biblical Mosaic (emphasizing the Books of Moses) chronology. One of these was the young Jean-Francois Champollion.

Meanwhile, a French antiquities collector named Saulnier had dispatched a master stonemason named Lelorrain on an expedition to Dendera to steal the zodiac. After using stone saws and chisels and finally dynamite, Lelorrain managed to cart the remains of the temple ceiling back to Paris. These remains, however, did not include the parts of the ceiling that ended up winning the Dendera zodiac debates. In September 1822, Champollion, after years of poverty-stricken excruciating
efforts,
⁹
finally cracked the code for how to decipher hieroglyphs. Champollion first deciphered the cartouches that contain royal names. (A cartouche is an oval enclosure in which the name of a pharaoh is inscribed. Only a king's name can be written within a cartouche.) Among the first cartouches he deciphered were those next to the Dendera zodiac. There he read the ancient Greek word for “ruler,” thus dating the construction of the zodiac ceiling to the Ptolemaic period and winning the debate for the side of the philologists, who could happily boot the physicists and astronomers out of the circle of those considered able to offer legitimate authority about antiquity.

Yet in what must be one of the great ironies of history, in 1828, when Champollion had the resources finally to mount his own expedition and he arrived at Dendera to see his famous cartouches, he was horrified to find them empty. They never had contained any hieroglyphs, no royal names at all. It seems the artists with Napoleon's army, who were often quite accurate in their depictions, in this case had been puzzled by the strange, empty cartouches and had sketched something in them simply for artistic reasons. By the time of Champollion's trip, however, the philologists had consolidated their authoritative hold on antiquities studies enough to keep the physical scientists at bay for some time. Further, as it turned out, Champollion's date was not far off anyway.
^*2

Eventually, we would have a new mode of historical understanding stemming from neither the extreme philologist-linguist camp nor the extreme physicist-astronomer camp, but a synthetic approach including many forms of evidence—archaeological, artistic, linguistic, and astronomical—that would come into play.

Because he began to employ such a synthetic approach, the father of archaeoastronomy may legitimately be the British astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer. Lockyer was born in 1836 in Rugby, England. As a young man, he had worked for the War Office in London, and it was there that he first developed a keen interest in astronomy. In 1862 Lockyer was made a fellow at the Royal Astronomical Society, and, in 1868, while working at the College of Chemistry in London, he made his first major contribution to science by showing that the bright emissions from the sun during a total eclipse were caused by an unknown element he named “helium”—twenty-seven years before Sir William Ramsay would isolate this gas in the laboratory! In 1869 Lockyer made another important contribution to science: he founded the journal
Nature,
which was to become the most influential scientific periodical in the world. Further, in 1885 Lockyer became the world's first professor of astronomical physics. For his many discoveries and achievements, Lockyer was knighted in 1897.

At the age of fifty-three, toward the end of his academic career, Lockyer indulged in his greatest passion: the study of the astronomies of ancient cultures and the alignments of their temples. He realized that archaeologists had not “paid any heed to the possible astronomical ideas of the temple
builders”
¹⁰
and, furthermore, that “there was little doubt that astronomical consideration had a great deal to do with the direction towards which these temples
faced.”
¹¹
He had read of the magnificent pyramids and temples of ancient Egypt, and so, in November 1890, Lockyer went there to see them for himself. In Cairo he was assisted by the German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch, an authority on astronomical inscriptions and drawings found in temples and tombs of pharaohs and noblemen. During a meeting with Lockyer, Brugsch explained that the rituals and ceremonies of ancient Egyptians clearly contained astronomical connotations. Encouraged by this, Lockyer sailed to Luxor. There he studied the alignment and symbolism of several temples, including the great temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak. Back in England, Lockyer published his findings in
The Dawn of Astronomy.
It was the first book of its kind, and, taking into account the incomplete and rudimentary knowledge of Egyptologists at that time, Lockyer's work is a remarkable achievement that brought to attention the importance of applying astronomy to the studies of ancient cultures. Yet even though Lockyer's approach was highly scientific and his arguments sound, nearly all Egyptologists either ignored or rudely derided his thesis. Like Galileo before him, who calmly told his inquisitors “but it [Earth] does move . . .” (
e pur si muove
), poor Lockyer told the Egyptologists “of all the large temples I examined there was an astronomical
basis . . .”
¹²
His words fell on deaf ears. In the years that followed, the Egyptologists took refuge in their belief that by having silenced Lockyer and having thrown him off their turf, they had shaken off all those pseudoscientists, dilettantes, and hangers-on who dared to oppose their views. For a while it did seem that they had succeeded.

In 1963, however, another archaeoastronomer came to haunt them again with a vengeance: the American professor Gerald Hawkins of the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hawkins infuriated archaeologists by publishing in Lockyer's now highly influential academic journal
Nature
a series of articles on the vexed topic of the alleged astronomy of Stonehenge, and he followed the articles with the publication of his now-renowned book
Stonehenge Decoded.
Hawkins went much further than Lockyer: he claimed that the alignments at Stonehenge were definitely astronomical and had been deliberately aimed at the sun and moon
azimuths
(positions at rising and setting). He also asserted that the fifty-six holes of the so-called Aubrey Circle were representative of the fifty-six years of the moon's full eclipse cycle of three nodal revolutions of 18.61 years each. The implications were huge. This interpretation meant that the ancient builders of Stonehenge, far from being primitives and illiterate barbarians, were sophisticated astronomers who also knew that Earth was a sphere or globe. This, of course, was pure anathema to the archaeologists, and soon they were again up in arms. As our colleague and friend John Anthony West once remarked:

There are few things in this world more predictable than the reaction of conventional minds to unconventional ideas. That reaction is always and invariably some combination of contempt, outrage, abuse and derision. . . . However, this standard reaction may be seriously muted or further enhanced by a potent new wild card, added to the deck only in the latter half of the twentieth century: the PR factor. If the unconventional idea attracts wide public interest, that is to say if it is easily understood and is “sexy” enough; especially if it results in bestselling books, extensive TV coverage or movie blockbusters, the attack gets ratcheted up. . . . As long as the public interest is there, Hollywood and television can be relied upon to keep stirring the pot no matter what the “experts” say. And sooner or later the cynics, skeptics and debunkers at the
New York Times, Scientific American
and
Skeptical Inquirer
will be forced to confront the offending
idea.
¹³

This time, however, they faced a less accommodating opponent than the passive Sir Lockyer. Hawkins's book became a bestseller, and, with his solid academic reputation, the archaeologists had much trouble quenching the huge interest and support Hawkins received from the public and media. Hawkins had singlehandedly forced the scholars out of their ivory towers and made them face up to the challenge. What made matters even worse for the skeptics was the support that he received from academic heavyweights such as Sir Fred Hoyle, who not only confirmed Hawkins's calculations but also agreed that “a veritable Newton or Einstein must have been at
work”
¹⁴
at Stonehenge three millennia ago.

Hawkins was soon followed by a Scotsman, Alexander Thom, an engineer with a keen interest in the ancient megaliths and prehistoric monuments of the British Isles. After years of meticulous investigation of the astronomical alignments of these ancient sites, Thom was convinced that all were the collective work of a pan-generation construction program that reached its pinnacle in 1850 BCE. He was able to show that many of the megalithic sites incorporated a common canon of geometry and mathematics that resembled what was supposedly invented by the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece—yet they appeared in the British Isles more than a millennium earlier! According to Thom, the dimensions of the prehistoric sites were determined by a common unit of measurement, about 2.72 feet in length, which he termed the
megalithic yard.
Thom proposed that these sites were meant to express magical ideas and symbolize important belief systems by making use of astronomical observations of the sun, moon, and stars.