Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

The rising time of stars is delayed by nearly four minutes each day. If we watch Sirius’s rising in early August, the rising
will be at dawn. In late October, the rising is at midnight. Sirius’s rising in early January is at dusk. There is a period from
late January to late May in which Sirius has already risen in daylight and seems to emerge out of the sky as the dome
darkens after sunset (that is, the sky becomes dark enough for us to see the spot of light that is Sirius). If we were at the
Giza pyramids in early March and we looked due south at dusk, Sirius would emerge from the sky directly over the Great
Pyramid. At one point in the year—in late May—Sirius can be seen hovering just over the western horizon after sunset.
In the days that follow this, the star will not be seen anymore, because it is now too close to the sun’s light for its own
light to be seen. Sirius remains thus invisible for about seventy days, until August 5, when it rises anew before sunrise in
the eastern horizon. This first dawn rising of Sirius is technically known as the heliacal rising of Sirius and was seen by
the Egyptians as the rebirth of the star.
BLACK GENESIS: YEAR ZERO
We in the modern world consider the Year Zero of our calendar to be the presumed birth of Jesus, which, today, is
thought to have been 2,010 years ago. *54 This, however, is purely an arbitrary date. Indeed many other people—such as
the Muslims, the Jews, the Chinese, and the Japanese—had (and some still have) other Year Zeroes for their own
calendars. Usually, years are numbered from the date of a historical person, either an ancient person, as in the case of the
Muslim, Jewish, and Christian calendars, or a sequence of emperors, as in ancient China or modern Japan, where legal
documents are dated “year Heisei 22.”
When was the Year Zero of the ancient Egyptians? How can we calculate its date? This is where we can note an
interesting issue regarding study of the drift of the civil calendar relative to the heliacal rising of Sirius.
Sirius was known as the Sparkling One, the Scorching One, or, less flatteringly, the Dog Star or Canicula. †55 These
epithets derived from the fact that the heliacal rising of this star occurred in midsummer, when the sun was at its hottest
—the so-called dog days of the Roman year. The Greeks called this star Sothis, a name that perhaps derived from the
ancient Egyptian Satis, the goddess of the Nile’s flood at Elephantine whom the Egyptians identified with Sirius. 55
Modern astronomers know it as Alpha Canis Major or by its common name, Sirius. It is the star that shines the
brightest in the sky—its brightness in absolute terms is twenty-three times the brightness of our sun. It is also twice as
massive as our sun and much hotter, and its 9,400-degrees-Kelvin temperature makes it appear to be brilliant white. The
American astronomer Robert Burnham Jr. tells us that it is “the brightest of the fixed stars . . . and a splendid object
throughout the winter months for observers in the northern hemisphere.” 56 The star Sirius, however, does not stand
alone. It is, in fact, part of a bright constellation we call Canis Major, the Big Dog, which trails behind Orion the Hunter.
As the brightest of all the visible stars, Sirius is almost ten times more brilliant than any other star and can be seen in
broad daylight with the aid of a small telescope. Its color is a brilliant bluish white. Quite simply, it is the crown jewel of
the starry world.
When the very first pyramid in Egypt was built around 2650 BCE, Sirius rose at azimuth 116 degrees near modern
Cairo. In 6000 BCE, when the prehistoric astronomers of the Sahara also observed it, Sirius rose at azimuth 130 degrees
at Nabta Playa. As we can see in appendix 1, in the centuries around 11,500 BCE, Sirius rose almost due south at
azimuth 180 degrees as seen from the Cairo area. It is a well-established fact that the Egyptians observed the rising of
Sirius, especially its heliacal rising, since at least 3200 BCE. Because of the effect of precession, the time and place on
the horizon of the heliacal rising of Sirius will slowly change. Today it takes place in early August. In 2781 BCE the
rising occurred on June 21, the day of the summer solstice, when the Nile also began to rise with the coming flood. Of
course, this propitious conjunction—the summer solstice, the heliacal rising of Sirius, and the start of the flood season—
would have been so for the prehistoric people of the Sahara, except that it was the playa flood season that started with the
monsoon season.
The Nile and the New Year
The summer solstice may have originally marked the first day of the civil calendar. This idea was first proposed in 1894