The Egypt Code Read Online Free PDF Page B

Egyptians
     

The East and Dawn
     
    ‘The ancient Egyptians were past masters of observing nature,’ wrote Anne-Sophie Bomhard. 14 They carefully observed nature, its creatures, its vegetation and its cycles. Nothing fascinated them more, however, than the observation of the celestial bodies. From earliest times they meticulously observed and recorded the rising of the sun and the stars in the east, which they called ‘the place where the gods were born’. 15
     
    An observer looking at sunrise from the same vantage point will quickly become aware that the sun changes position along the eastern horizon throughout the year and will alternate between two extreme points: the summer solstice north of east, and the winter solstice south of east. At these two extreme points the sun appears to be stationary for a week or so, hence the term ‘solstice’ (from the Latin, meaning ‘stationary sun’). In our modern Gregorian calendar the summer solstice falls on 21 June and the winter solstice on 21 December. Counting the days between two summer solstices will give 365 days, which we call the ‘year’. Most historians of science agree that this discovery was first made in Egypt, probably in the fourth millennium BC. It was most probably around 2800 BC that a 365-day solar calendar was put into practice by the priests of the Great Sun Temple at Heliopolis.
     
    The exact solar (tropical) year is 365.2422 days long (although the extra 0.2422 day is assumed to be 0.25, i.e. an exact quarter-day, for calendrical purposes). So to keep our modern Gregorian calendar in synch with the seasons, we add one day every four years to the month of February. This special year is called a leap year. The Egyptians, however, did not have a leap year. They simply let their calendar drift out of synch with the seasons. As the eminent British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie explains:
    We are all familiar with the leap year, when we put an extra day in the calendar to keep the account true. The whole checking of the chronology rests on the unquestioned fact that the Egyptians ignored the leap year, and counted only 365 days . . . Now the Egyptian slipped his months backward a quarter of a day each year, by not keeping up the enumeration as we do with a 29th of February. As the months thus slipped backward, or the seasons appeared to slip forward in the calendar , in 1460 years the [calendar] months shifted round all the seasons. 16
     
     
     
    This ‘unquestioned fact’ that the ancient Egyptians ignored the leap year meant that a cycle was created of 1,460 years which can be seen as a Great Year. The value of 1,460 years is obtained by simply dividing 365 by 0.25. And although it is this value that is given by Petrie and also quoted by modern Egyptologists for the resynch of the calendar with the seasons, they are all assuming a yearly drift of the calendar of 0.25 days, which, of course, is not the case precisely. The true rate of drift is 0.2422 days, which gives us 1506 years (365 divided by 0.2422), which can be seen as a Great Solar Cycle. Actually the value of 1,460 years quoted by Petrie is not the resynch of the calendar with the seasons but rather with the heliacal rising of Sirius, an event which was called by the Egyptians wp rnpt , meaning ‘opener of the year’ 17 (see below). The heliacal rising - or first dawn - rising of Sirius had two peculiarities which the Egyptians were quick to notice: first, it took place near the summer solstice, which also happened to be the start of the flood season; and second, it drifted forward by exactly one day every four years with respect to the calendar. 18 And although the ancient Egyptians were fully aware of this drift of the calendar, they made no attempt to correct it by having a leap year. This non-adjustment policy had immense repercussions on the way the Egyptians perceived time and the order of the universe. For although it is nearly certain that at one time in their past they had