Black Genesis Read Online Free PDF Page A

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