Black Genesis (35 page)
There seems to be mounting evidence that there was some symbolic architecture at Giza and Dashur during Zep Tepi and that it referenced Vega and Sirius, because these stars represented the First Time, the beginning of the Great Year of precession. At this point defenders of the orthodox view may object along the traditional line of thinking that there was nothing at Giza before the Old Kingdom and that, therefore, it is not plausible that several millennia earlier there was monumental architecture. As Zahi Hawass, director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, states, “But no single piece of material culture, not a single object nor piece of an object, has been found at Giza that can be interpreted as coming from a lost civilization [before the Egyptian
Dynasties].”
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The Great Sphinx, however, must qualify as a piece of material culture. Further, though the Sphinx may not have been in existence as far back as Zep Tepi, and perhaps it was, or is, only seven thousand years old, the minimum age required by geophysical weathering. In either case, the Sphinx is strong evidence that there was monumental symbolic architecture at Giza long before the pharaonic Old Kingdom times. In the orthodox view, of course, the physical evidence for the ancient Sphinx could be dismissed on the basis that it is an anomalyâthe only piece of evidenceâand, therefore, it doesn't count. The Vega shafts and Sirius platform Zep Tepi findings can also be dismissed by some as anomalies based on the fact that this evidence is astroceremonial, rather than proved by radiocarbon or other traditional dating methods. At some point, however, enough anomalies from enough different disciplines add up to an overwhelming body of evidence.
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So the developmental sequence may have been thus: The Black African star people of the Sahara developed the forerunner of the Egyptian civilization and, in the process, built the astroceremonial complex at Nabta Playa. When the extreme dryness of the region finally set in, they moved to the Nile Valley and developed the archaic temple of Satis at Elephantine Island. They then spread throughout the Nile Valley, assimilating the existing populations into dynastic Egypt and increasing their megalithic building activities. By the third dynasty, King Djoser, with his astronomer-priest Imhotep, built at Saqqara the first major monumental complex of dynastic Egypt. Then fourth-dynasty founder King Sneferu, and Sneferu's son, King Khufu, built the Bent Pyramid at Dashur, followed by the Great Pyramid at Giza, both constructed on top of much more ancient sacred subterranean passages and platforms from Zep Tepi. Thus, all the truly monumental pyramid architecture of the dynastic period (with the exception, perhaps, of the fourth-dynasty Unfinished Pyramid at Zawiyet el-Aryan) is associated with Zep Tepi. The Great Sphinx at Giza already existed in some form and was probably modified by fourth-dynasty refurbishments. The Zep Tepi architecture was likely abandoned for a long time before the protodynastic and dynastic Egyptians arrived to build on itâor at least it was little used and clearly was not in a location of a major habitation or city.
The question then becomes: Can we draw a line back through time from the dynastic Egyptian architects to the Nabta Playa megalith builders and back even further to Zep Tepi builders? We can recall that circa 5000 BCE the Black African star people at Nabta Playa built their astroceremonial complex on top of a preexisting symbolic landscape carved onto the bedrock that they knew to be much more ancient. Further, when they moved to the Nile and up to Giza, they again built on top of much more ancient star monuments. All these constructions display a knowledge of the stars that would seem to have taken a very long time to develop. Surely the Nabta Playa star people who became the protodynastic ancient Egyptian builders were aware of and perhaps somehow connected to the more ancient Zep Tepi people. Perhaps they were the Shemsu Hor, who migrated from the Nile to the Sahara when the monsoons moved north and made the Sahara green, and it is their very distant progeny who we can track back through Nabta Playa to the Nile as the monsoons again moved south.
SOTHIC CYCLES AND ZEP TEPI
We must next consider how the calendar-based Sothic cycle from the Old Kingdom may relate to Zep Tepi. We can recall how 11,541 BCE would have been the start of a Sothic cycle if it was reached by measuring in increments of the 1,460-year calendar counting method, starting from the one recorded Sothic cycle end in 139 CE. Yet the precise interval between heliacal risings of Sirius, as with any star, varies somewhat if we consider it over an entire precession cycle. Around 12,000 BCE, when Sirius was very low on the southern horizon, the idea of heliacal rising at Giza was problematic, because Sirius didn't even reach the 1-degree altitude normally considered for heliacal reappearance. Simple geometry, however, shows us a very interesting fact: when Sirius was at its southern culmination it was highest in the sky at midnight on the day of summer solstice. At Giza, then, the place of Zep Tepi, the precise year around 12,000 BCE that marked the southern culmination of Sirius was by definition the heliacal rise of the entire Sirius precession cycleâthe origin of the supercycle of all the cycles. Further, at essentially the same time the king of all North Stars, Vega, culminated shining down into the subterranean passage and the pattern of the three stars of Orion's belt matched perfectly the pattern of the three pyramids of Giza.
Another Way to Think of the Southern Culmination of a Star
Those inclined to think geometrically can easily visualize this: the southern culmination of a star, in this case Sirius, occurs when the south pole of Earth points as nearly toward the star as is possible during the twenty-six-thousand-year precession cycle. This orientation is similar to the Earth-to-sun orientation at winter solstice, which occurs every year. On the day of summer solstice, then, the sun and a south-culminating star (in this case, Sirius) are directly opposite each other relative to Earth. We can then imagine the sun shining on Earth and creating a shadow (nighttime) on the far side of the planet. Thus the south-culminating star is viewed at midnight on the day of summer solstice and on the meridian (due south, just at the horizonâin the case of Sirius, at Giza) at the darkest time of night. We can also see that in some sense the geometrical heliacal rising of a south-culminating star occurs at vernal equinox, because that is the day of the year when an observer on spinning Earth moves from dark into light, just as the south-culminating star is on the meridian, but in actual viewing conditions the sky is probably too bright to see the star at that moment.
EXACT DATE OF ZEP TEPI?
Astronomy in isolation can give precise dates, but we must make the cultural connection. In summary, the astronomically determined dates related to Zep Tepi are these: (1) the layout of the Great Pyramids at Giza, referring back to the centuries around 11,700 BCE; (2) the southern culmination of Sirius circa 12,280 BCE, marked by the location of the Giza monuments and the Queen's Chamber horizontal passage; and (3) Vega located as North Star at its northern culmination, in 12,070 BCE, marked by the subterranean passage of Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza and Sneferu's Bent Pyramid at Dashur. Yet we may want to know what was the exact date of Zep Tepi. It's important to remember that Zep Tepi is an astroceremonial concept: it is a combination of astronomical measurement and cultural-religious meaning. It is the origin of long-term human cultural cycles and is a calendrical origin to long-term astronomical cycles. Here we have hammered away at the purely astronomical parts of an exact date. The astronomy seems to point to Zep Tepi being in the era around 12,000 BCE. Further, the date is associated conceptually with the culminations of Sirius and Vega, which mark the starting point of the long-term precession cycle, or Great Year, of about twenty-six thousand years, and with Orion's belt,
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which provides the sky asterism for tracking that Great Year. If Zep Tepi did refer to a more specific date we must make more progress on understanding culturally the specific aspect of astronomy to which it was tied. We don't seem to have a complete answer at this timeâbut we have suggested some clues. Specifically, this cycle is what we also know as the cycle of Zodiac Ages and has also been correlated to the Vedic Yuga cycle, and both of those originated in the same general
epoch.
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Further, we have suggested that the northern culmination of the center of our galaxy, which visually is located in the Dark Rift in the Milky Way, occurs in the same epoch,
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may also be monumentally referenced, and can provide a less variable calibration point, because, unlike stars, it has no proper motion. We have seen that the Great Sphinx at Giza, gazing east to the rising sun in its namesake constellation, Leo, also comes from around the same
epoch.
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As we have seen in chapter 6, British Egyptologist Rundle T. Clark concluded this about Zep Tepi: “[A]ll that was good or efficacious was established on the principles laid down in the âFirst Time'âwhich was, therefore, a golden age of absolute
perfection.”
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If the Vedic Yuga cycle is properly calibrated to the precession cycle in the same way, then we can conclude that Zep Tepi was coincident with the center of the Satya Yuga, which the Vedas identified as the perfect time or golden age of humanity. Here we trace the physical archaeological and astro-ceremonial evidence to identify that the ancients themselves placed that golden age in the epoch around 12,000 BCE. The question of whether there could be some mechanism that actually does connect the astrophysical cycle to the cultural development of humans is a subject beyond the scope of this book.
APPENDIX 2
SOTHIC CYCLES AND IMHOTEP'S CALENDAR WALL
The Sothic cycle is the duration of synchrony between a 365-day Egyptian civil calendar and the heliacal rising of Sirius. A difficulty with calculating this cycle lies in defining
heliacal rising.
The basic concept of heliacal rising is the day of the year on which Sirius first seems to reappear on the eastern horizon just before the sun rises. Obviously, it would be problematic if we were to apply this purely visual definition. If the weather happened to be cloudy or the sky was filled with dust, an otherwise viewable reappearance would be missed, perhaps for many days. A more sensible definition could be the day on which Sirius would be visible, if the viewing conditions were optimal, and
optimal
is defined as a specific angular relationship of sun, Sirius, and horizon.
In order to understand the Sothic cycle, we must first look at two related cycles. Today the length of the tropical year is 365.2422 days, so that a 365-day civil calendar would return the day of summer solstice to the same calendar date every 1,507.1 years. (We can call this the solstice-to-civil cycle.) Today the length of the sidereal year (with respect to the distant stars) is 365.2564 days, so that a 365-day calendar would return a star sign or zodiac constellation date to the same calendar date every 1,423.8 years. (We can call this the sidereal-to-civil cycle.) This difference between the sidereal-to-civil cycle of 1,423.8 years and the solstice-to-civil cycle of 1,507.1 years is due to the precession of Earth's pole, the precession of the equinox. If Earth did not precess, then the sidereal-to-civil cycle would be the same as the solstice-to-civil cycle. Further, those sidereal and solstice rates are as measured today, while the actual precession rate varies slightly over time, which means these cycle durations also vary. Because the heliacal rising is a combination of sidereal and solar measurementsâessentially, a complex addition of the twoâwe would expect the Sothic cycle, to first approximation, to be the average of the sidereal and solstice cycles, which, given today's rates, would be 1,465.4 years. This is remarkably close to the purely calendar-based cycle of 1,460 yearsâthe cycle between two types of civil calendar systems (one that adds a day every four years, like our leap year, and a fixed, 365-day calendar such as the Egyptian civil calendar).
Yet we would expect an actual Sothic cycle to vary from our rough estimate, due to several factors. First, the precession rate varies with time; the rate has been steadily increasing since roughly 8000 BCE. Today, the precession rate is about 50.29 arc seconds per year, while around 4000 BCE the rate was roughly 1 arc second per year slower. Due to this effect alone, almost half of one year would be added to the Sothic cycle over the span of about two Sothic cycles. A second factor is that the tropical year itself also changes over timeâbut this effect is orders of magnitude smaller. A third factor, more difficult to estimate but which has a greater effect, is due to the change in declination of the star and its drift in right ascension relative to the vernal pointâthe day relative to solstice moves steadily through the year so that the angular relationship of star to sun to horizon is altered.
Still, we can fairly easily use SkyMapPro to measure the Sothic cycles. First, we set the latitude to that of Djoser's step pyramid (29.871 degrees north) and we set the year to 2781 BCE and we set the day to summer solstice. The result is that on that day, when Sirius is at altitude 1 degree, the sun is at altitude -8.96 degrees 45 minutes before the center of the sun disk passes the horizon. This is clearly a good reference for heliacal rising, because Sirius is certainly bright enough to be seen briefly under such conditions. We call this summer solstice day, the first day of Thoth (1 Thoth) on the Egyptian civil calendar, and we note that SkyMapPro calls this day July 16, 2781 BCE. We make this the definition of Sirius heliacal risingâthe day of the year when Sirius is at altitude 1 degree and the sun is simultaneously at altitude -8.96 degrees or lower. Next, we search for the previous year when Sirius rose heliacally on a first day of Thoth (1 Thoth) according to the Egyptian civil calendar. We know that SkyMapPro uses Julian years (365.25 days per year), so we note that what SkyMapPro calls July 16, 4241 BCE, is a first day of Thoth on the Egyptian civil calendar. When we look at that date, we see that when Sirius was at 1 degree altitude, the sun was at -9.41 degrees altitude just below the horizon, and the day before 1 Thoth, the sun was only -8.70 degrees below the horizonâless than our criterion of 8.96 degreesâso in that year the first day of Thoth was indeed the day of reappearance of Sirius.
We must remember, however, that a given date for heliacal rising of Sirius should persist for about four years in a row on the Egyptian civil calendar, so in order to nail down the exact Sothic cycle, we must check the following years. We see, then, that two years later, 4239 BCE, on the first day of Thoth with Sirius at altitude 1 degree, the sun was -9.05 degrees altitude, which still satisfies heliacal rising (and this time, eleven days before summer solstice). In later years, all the way up until 2781 BCE, the first day of Thoth was not the heliacal rising date. So this Sothic cycle extended from 4239 BCE to 2781 BCE (in Julian years), which is 1,459 Egyptian civil calendar years.
By a similar method, we find that the next first day of Thoth-Sirius heliacal rising was 1325 BCE (twelve days after summer solstice) which is 1,457 Egyptian civil calendar years. These cycles agree with Ingham's
calculations
1
âhe calculated the cycles before and after 2769 BCE and came up with 1,458 and 1,456 Julian years, which equal 1,459 and 1,457 Egyptian civil calendar years. Ingham's date of 2769 BCE
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came from stepping back in time and using a definition of
heliacal rising
that is slightly different from ours. As our definition, we chose whatever the condition was on 2781 BCE summer solstice, so clearly the twelve-year difference in our starting dates is not a discrepancy and we agree on those cycle durations.
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Now we can reconsider the panels on the Djoser complex monument wall. The eastern wall, with 1,459 panels, may in fact reflect the 1,459 Egyptian civil years of the Sothic cycle preceding its construction. The 1,461 panels on the western wall may reflect the average duration since the last time that the first day of Thoth coincided with Sirius heliacalâa period that lasted for four years, yielding a cycle time of from 1,463 to 1,459 years, which averages 1,461. In addition, the 1,461panel wall may reflect a standardized or general public knowledge cycle (the cycle if the Sirius year was exactly 365.25 days, which would be the first estimate immediately when they noticed that a given Sirius appearance date lasts about 4 yearsâsimilar to how the general public today is aware of the simple 4-year “leap year” cycle, but few are aware of the more esoteric exact year cycle that needs to be adjusted over the millennia). The 1,459-panel wall could reflect the esoteric knowledge of the exact natural cycle known only to initiates such as Imhotep. In either case, the difference of 2 years represented on the walls progress in time from east to west could also reflect the changing Sothic cycleâthe next one will be 2 years shorter. Further, the difference between the eastern and western wall representationsâ2 yearsâappears to be reflected in the northern and southern walls, each of which has 722 panels. Two years equal 720 solar days or 722 sidereal days (we can remember that a sidereal day is the time it takes Earth to complete one rotation relative to the vernal equinox, which is essentially one full rotation with respect to the stars), and it is 4 minutes shorter than a solar day, which is a full rotation with respect to the sun. Thus there is one extra sidereal day in a standard solar year of 365 days, as we can also see because one solar day rotation is taken by Earth moving around the sun in one year. The Sothic cycle is essentially a combination of stellar and solar cycles.
Imhotep seems to be informing us that the ancient Egyptians knew thisâand they knew the cycle durations very accurately, for they show this in symbolizing human's unity with the cosmos by synchronizing the human civil calendar with cosmic astrocalendars in their monumental architecture. If we accept that Imhotep knew not only that an approximation to the Sothic cycle was 1,461 Egyptian civil years but also the precise duration of the previous Sothic cycle, then we can believe that he knew that this cycle is a combination of solar and sidereal motions and that he had a concept of the difference between the sidereal day and the solar day. If he did, it is highly likely that he was informed by careful observations going back at least one Sothic cycle, which brings us back to the period of heavy activity at Nabta Playa.
We can also note that this interpretation for the step pyramid complex wall, which otherwise would appear as a needlessly convoluted design, addresses not only the elegant calendar and cosmic meanings of the wall panel design but also the reason why it was built when it was. It was fashioned to mark the correspondence of the summer solstice and the heliacal rising of Sirius, something that happens only once every twenty-six thousand years, and to calibrate that with the first day of Thoth on the Egyptian civil calendar.
Clearly, then, some time around the building and design of the step pyramid complex, a heliacal rising of Sirius occurred simultaneous with the summer solstice and the first day of Thoth. We cannot get to the precise date without knowing the exact way in which the ancient Egyptians determined the heliacal rising or by some other constraint. The Djoser serdab may give us this other constraint. We can remember that the serdab was probably not meant as a precision deviceâit shows us the king gazing at the area of the sky where Alkaid was at the time of Sirius's rising. Finding a best fit for that alignment may help constrain our date. Somewhere around 2680 BCE may be a good estimate. On that date, on the day of summer solstice, Sirius was at 1 degree above the horizon, the sun was 8.16 degrees below horizon (suitable for a reappearance of Sirius), and Alkaid was at 13.4 degrees altitude and 3.14 degrees azimuthâwithin the viewing range of the serdab.
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We can almost hear the massive calendar wall announcing, “We now monumentalize in stone our transition from the good old days of acting as nomads around Nabta Playa to a more settled existence in monumental cities, which means that we're going to have to rely more on that civil calendar that nobody much likes because it drifts with respect to the wondrous natural astrocalendar of our ancestors. We're going to have to keep the civil calendar in use for collecting taxes and enforcing legal contractsâbut here, in great splendor, is a monument that shows how the two types of time, human time and godly cosmic time, work together.”