The Egypt Code Read Online Free PDF

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. 71
     
     
     
    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
     

The Flood
     
    Each year the great river would begin to swell in June and eventually overflow its banks and flood the adjacent land. This was a phenomenon that completely mystified the Egyptians. They had absolutely no idea why the Nile should do that and were the more bewildered because the flood came not in the rainy season, as might be expected, but in the height of summer when the weather was at its driest. As Herodotus noted when he visited Egypt in c. 450 BC:
    About why the Nile behaves precisely as it does I could get no information from the priests nor yet from anyone else. What I particularly wished to know is why the water begins to rise at the summer solstice, continues to do so for a hundred days, and then falls again at the end of that period, so that it remains low throughout the winter until the summer solstice comes round again in the following year. 12
     
     
     
    For a people living in a climate where the sun shone nearly throughout the year, and who were thus accustomed to seeing sunrise each morning and sunset each evening, it was inevitable that they would eventually notice that the yearly cycle of the flood seemed to be in synch with the yearly cycle of the sky. It would have become quickly obvious to them that when the sun reached its most northerly position on the horizon (at the summer solstice), the Nile would begin to swell. They also noticed that preceding the summer solstice sunrise certain constellations would always be seen dominating the eastern horizon. All this prompted them to carefully count and record the number of days between each cycle. It would have taken but a few years to convince them that the cycle was 365 days long. It would also have been entirely natural for them to consider the summer solstice as the first day of the new year and call it, aptly, the Birth of Ra. 13 This is because many celestial and terrestrial events that happened at this time of year evoked the idea of a beginning or a birth. For, as we have already seen in the Introduction, was not the Nile reborn at the summer solstice, and along with it the whole of Egypt? And did not Ra himself emerge from his journey through the Duat, the world of the dead, when he reached the summer solstice, as we have also seen in the Introduction?
     

    The various astronomical cycles known to the Ancient