Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

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The modern town of Abu Simbel lies only 100 kilometers (62 miles) due east of Nabta Playa—three to four days’ journey on foot. This would have been the most obvious route to take to reach the Nile Valley. We recall, however, that the central theme of the desert peoples’ cosmological beliefs was fixated on the summer solstice sunrise—the time when both sunrise and the appearance of Orion and Sirius at dawn heralded the monsoon rains that brought life to the desert. Now that the rains came no more, however, did they still look toward the summer solstice for guidance? What propitious sign might the cattle people have taken? The Calendar Circle’s summer solstice has an alignment to azimuth of about 62 degrees—that is, the place of sunrise at summer solstice. Was this a sort of prehistoric pointer for an exodus from Nabta Playa toward the Nile Valley? Was there among the star people of Nabta Playa a prehistoric Moses who led the way toward the rising sun and took his people toward a promised land in the east? At summer solstice the sun remains at more or less the same place for about eight days, with a variation of azimuth as little as 2-arc minutes. 10 This means that the party of people leaving Nabta Playa had ample time to reach the Nile Valley by walking toward the sunrise. To where might this direction of azimuth 62 degrees have finally led them? THE SACRED ISLAND OF ELEPHANTINE The region of Aswan is some 250 kilometers (155 miles) northeast of Nabta Playa. A party traveling from Nabta Playa toward the rising sun at summer solstice would have reached Aswan after a journey of four to five days. This region is without doubt the choicest place to settle in the Nile Valley. The climate is perfect, with sunshine throughout the year, and at Aswan the river is at its very best—wide with clean, clear water dotted with beautiful islands, the most beautiful being the island of Elephantine. Elephantine, as far as islands go, is rather small. It is 1.2 kilometers (.75 mile) long and 0.5 kilometer (.3 mile) wide and is located downriver within sight of the first cataract *48 and opposite the modern town of Aswan. Today half of the island has been developed into a tourist resort, but the remainder is an archaeological wonderland that contains the great temple of Khnum and the lovely temple of the goddess Satis, as well as many other ancient vestiges from the entire age of ancient Egypt. There are no bridges that link the island to the mainland; it can be accessed only by boat or ferry. On the east of the island and across the river is the lush Nile Valley, to the west are high sand dunes, and beyond them is the open desert. The Nile here is at its widest, about 1 kilometer (.62 mile), and the water is clear, cool, and wonderfully refreshing. The banks are lined with palm and banana trees, and there are many colorful bougainvillea and oleander trees. Sunset brings hundreds of white egrets to perch on the trees, and there they look like winged snowflakes or angels. At daybreak the water buffaloes, Egypt’s most ancient and strongest beasts of labor, graze in the shallows while local women do their laundry. Here, life is as it has always been for thousands of years: peaceful, serene, and timeless. An enthusiastic seventeenth-century English traveler, George Sandys, wrote of this place: . . . than the waters whereof there is none more sweete: being not unpleasantly cold, and of all others the most wholesome. Confirmed by that answer of Pescenius Niger unto his murmuring soldiery, “What? Crave you wine and have Nilus to drinke of?” . . . So much it nourisheth, as that the inhabitants thinke that it forthwith converteth into bloud. . . . Besides it procureth liberall urine, cureth the dolour of the veins, and is most soveraigne against that windy melancholy arising from the shorter ribs, which so saddeth the mind of the diseased. 11 In very ancient times, Elephantine was the capital of the First Nome (district) of Upper Egypt. It was considered a place sacred to Khnum, the ram-headed creator god who is said to have fashioned humankind on his potter’s wheel. Khnum’s consort was the goddess Satet—also known as Satis. The notoriety of Elephantine rested on the belief that it was here where the floodwaters emerged from the underworld, or Duat, to rejuvenate the land of Egypt. 12 The goddess Satis was regarded as the protector of Egypt’s southern frontier, and as such she was depicted holding a bow and arrows. She was also the guardian of the source of the flood and, as such, was identified with the star Sirius, whose heliacal rising occurred in conjunction with the beginning of the flood season. 13 The goddess Satis is attested in ancient texts as early as 2700 BCE, and her name is found on pottery as far north as Saqqara, nearly 900 kilometers (559 miles) from Elephantine. We also find her name inscribed in pyramids of the fourth and fifth dynasties (ca. 2300 BCE), where she is said to purify the body of the dead king with the rejuvenating flood waters brought in jars from Elephantine. 14 Satis is depicted as a tall, slender woman wearing the White Crown of Upper Egypt with antelope horns. In Egypt the antelope lives in the desert, which may symbolize the origins of Satis. On the crown is often drawn a five-
pointed star, which represents Sirius. Her many epithets—Lady of Stars, Mistress of the Eastern Horizon of the Sky at Whose Sight Everyone Rejoices, The Great One in the Sky, Ruler of the Stars, Satis Who Brightens the Two Lands with her Beauty—are clearly allusions to her important identification with the star Sirius. 15 Her beautiful, small temple on Elephantine is just north of the much larger temple of her consort, Khnum. Excavation and restoration of the Satis temple by the German Archaelogy Institute of Cairo has been ongoing since 1969, and although the restored temple that is seen today dates from the Ptolemaic period, 16 beneath it are the remains of several earlier temples, stacked one atop the other like tiers on a wedding cake, going back to the predynastic period. In all, there are seven temples, the lowest being a simple shrine that dates from about 3200 BCE. Above it are two Old Kingdom shrines that date to around 2250 BCE, and above these are two Middle Kingdom temples that date to circa 1950 BCE. These are surmounted by a New Kingdom shrine built by Queen Hatshepsut, around 1480 BCE, and finally, at the very top, is the restored Ptolemaic temple, which dates to the second century BCE. *49 17 In 1983 the American astronomer Ron Wells of the University of California took an interest in the alignments of the many superimposed Satis temples. 18 Working under the aegis of the Swiss Archaeological Institute in Cairo, Wells was permitted to take azimuth measurements of all the temples that were stacked on top of each other. It quickly became obvious to him that the azimuths of the temples differed slightly from one another, progressively changing in a counterclockwise direction. To a trained astronomer, this implied that the ancient builders were tracking the rising point of a celestial object, which changed azimuth proportionally. Ron Wells knew of the symbolic links between the goddess Satis and the star Sirius and thus had a hunch that the changing azimuths of the temple’s axes through the epoch may have something to do with the changing azimuths of the rising of Sirius. Making use of the pole star Polaris (Alpha Canis Minor) to establish true north, Wells calculated the azimuth of the topmost (Ptolemaic) temple and found it to be 114.65 degrees. He then calculated the azimuth of the earlier (New Kingdom) temple beneath it and found it to be 120.60 degrees. The 5.95-degree difference in azimuth exactly matched the difference in azimuth of Sirius for the same two epochs! 19 The azimuth changes of the axes of the temples implies an awareness of the precessional shift. Skeptics have argued that successive ancient surveyors were not aware that the older axis was no longer directed to Sirius, and they simply oriented a new temple’s axis without being conscious of the change. This may perhaps be an explanation, however, if only one change had taken place; but the original axis was changed at least four times. The ancient surveyors surely must have known that the temple was dedicated to Satis, goddess of the flood linked to the heliacal rising of Sirius, and it seems inconceivable that they did not notice the change in azimuth of the axes of the various temples that were aligned to this star. More recently, in 2004, the Spanish astronomer Juan Belmonte, along with the Egyptian astronomer Mossalam Shaltout, undertook a new study of the orientations of the superimposed Satis temples and confirmed Wells’s measurements as well as the orientation of the lowest, and thus oldest, shrine: “The archaic sacred precinct of Satet [Satis] at Elephantine: this area was enclosed on three sides by three large boulders of granite and opened roughly towards the south-eastern area of the horizon, where the sun rises at the winter solstice and where Sirius rose heliacally in 3200 B.C. The shrine is preserved in a cellar below the concrete terrace where the temple of Satet, erected by Hatshepsut, has been reconstructed.” 20 Interestingly, Wells also determined that the topmost Satis temple had been aligned to other star systems. One set of alignments was toward Orion’s belt and another set was toward the Big Dipper. These were the very same constellations and stars to which the various alignments of the ceremonial complex at Nabta Playa had been directed thousands of years before. This was too much of an actual coincidence to be merely accidental. We can recall that it was, indeed, from this location that the ancient Egyptian governor of Aswan and Elephantine, the explorer Harkhuf, launched his epic journeys to the kingdom of Yam. Harkhuf ’s tomb, where are inscribed the stories of his journeys, is located on the west bank of the Nile in the hills almost directly opposite Elephantine Island. It is very tempting to suppose that Harkhuf knew the location of Yam before he set off on his first expedition, because he knew that his ancestors had come from there. The earliest date for the Satis temple is about 3200 BCE, a date that uncannily coincides with the departure of the cattle people from Nabta Playa. Had the latter come here and brought along with them the astronomical ideas that were incorporated into the multileveled temples of Satis? At Elephantine, in about 3200 BCE, it was not the monsoon rains that brought renewal and regeneration of the land but the Nile’s flood, which was the direct result of the monsoon rains that no longer occur in this part of Egypt, but instead occur much farther south, in central Africa. In other words, the same system of astronomical knowledge that was
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For my daughter, Candice, and my so
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book was not a
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More Mysteries at Nabta Playa The S
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INTRODUCTION ANCIENT EGYPT REBORN N
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1 STRANGE STONES In Nabta there are
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desert” emerge from the surroundi
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stage the CPE anthropologists were
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arguments—and especially on the B
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This time, some archaeologists took
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who’s who of famous men: it inclu
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huge rocky massif sprouting out of
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Almasy planned an expedition to Gil
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of Setu and Irtet after having expl
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Sahara, and their bones were brough
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Djedefre Water Mountain, as Bergama
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Figure 2.5. Abu Ballas Pottery Hill
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can imagine how these scholars felt
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followed by the same determinative
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The surface of the now-covered bedr
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indeed, one of the main objectives
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In addition to tumuli tombs of catt
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since fallen. The largest ones were
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ALIGNMENTS TOWARD THE STARS: WHEN A
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elated not only to the gates of the
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dates within thousands of years of
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the largest stone. Again, the dista
Page 55 and 56: thus sent in an order to Quickbird
Page 57 and 58: Finally, to our relief, the light f
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Page 61 and 62: associated with the heleical rising
Page 63 and 64: ight angle. After that date, Nabta
Page 65 and 66: also note that several megalithic a
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Page 69 and 70: Figure 4.14. Bagnold Circle in, top
Page 71 and 72: have been placed by humans, possibl
Page 73 and 74: 5 THE BIBLE, THE HAMITES, AND THE B
Page 75 and 76: Even allowing that scholars tend to
Page 77 and 78: May 11, 2001, vol. 292, no. 5519, p
Page 79 and 80: egions: the Nile Valley and the vas
Page 81 and 82: At any rate, suffice it to say that
Page 83 and 84: perspective. We must also acknowled
Page 85 and 86: Plate 2. Djedefre Water Mountain, c
Page 87 and 88: Plate 8. Robert Bauval with herder
Page 89 and 90: Plate 15. Models of cows, Eleventh
Page 91 and 92: Plate 22. The rock-cut tomb of Hark
Page 93 and 94: wagging tail. We found them on the
Page 95 and 96: BCE to 2500 BCE. What she found odd
Page 97 and 98: eassure us that all is not lost, af
Page 99 and 100: Figure 5.3. Numerous prehistoric ha
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Page 109 and 110: In the first century, some half-cen
Page 111 and 112: Egyptologists have established that
Page 113 and 114: Like the Nabta Playa prehistoric st
Page 115 and 116: y the astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer
Page 117 and 118: In appendix 1 we look in detail at
Page 119 and 120: esynchronized every 1,460 years—t
Page 121 and 122: ÷ 10 = 3.9 years for the calendar
Page 123 and 124: ole, he was known as Hor-Akhti, Hor
Page 125 and 126: The rounded planisphere that is see
Page 127 and 128: topped mound whose midpoint and end
Page 129 and 130: POSTSCRIPT DISCOVERY OF THE KIFAH C
Page 131 and 132: APPENDIX 1 BACK TO THE FIRST TIME V
Page 133 and 134: TAKE A WALK AT THE FIRST TIME WITH
Page 135 and 136: alignment is part of a symbolic sys
Page 137 and 138: Pyramid at Zawiyet el-Aryan) is ass
Page 139 and 140: APPENDIX 2 SOTHIC CYCLES AND IMHOTE
Page 142 and 143: APPENDIX 3 SAVING NABTA PLAYA Will
Page 144 and 145: Figure A2. Rubbish dumps in the cen
Page 146 and 147: a huge pumping station (the Mubarak
Page 148 and 149: In actual practice, though, the dev
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Page 154 and 155: Endnotes CHAPTER 1. STRANGE STONES
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Mentioning Yam and Tekhebet,” Sah
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13. J. M. Malville, R. Schild, F. W
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41. Thomas Brophy, The Mechanism De
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34. G. A. Wainwright, “Seshat and
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100. The story is told in the Westc
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Bibliography Abed, Wael T. The Othe
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Genzlinger, Neil. “Chasing Mummie
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Millennium: A Reassessment.” Jour
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About the Authors Egyptian-born Rob
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BOOKS OF RELATED INTEREST Lost Know
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