Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

y the astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer. The German chronologist E. Meyer also proposed it in 1908. Recently the
Spanish astronomer Juan Belmonte revived this idea and further proposed that the summer solstice was the basis of
the original calendar. According to the archaeoastronomer Edwin C. Krupp:
In ancient Egypt this annual reappearance of Sirius fell close to the summer solstice and coincided with the time of
Nile’s inundation. Isis, as Sirius, was the “mistress of the year’s beginning,” for the Egyptian New Year was set by
this event. New Year’s ceremony texts at Dendera say Isis coaxed out the Nile and caused it to swell. The
metaphor is astronomical, hydraulic, and sexual, and it parallels the function of Isis in the myth. Sirius revives the
Nile just as Isis revives Osiris. Her time of hiding from Set is when Sirius is gone from the night sky. She gives birth
to her son Horus, as Sirius gives birth to the New Year, and in texts Horus and the New Year are equated. She is the
vehicle for renewal of life and order. Shining for a moment, one morning in summer, she stimulates the Nile and
starts the year. 57
The British astronomer R. W. Sloley reminds us, and with good reason, that “ultimately, our clocks are really timed
by the stars. The master-clock is our earth, turning on its axis relative to the fixed stars.” 58 Further, the American
astronomer and director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, Ed Krupp, points out that “celestial aligned
architecture and celestially timed ceremonies tell us our ancestors watched the sky accurately and systematically.” 59 What
we may most want to know is whether Egyptians also used the stars for long-term computations of time, such as the
Sothic cycle of 1,460 years. Perhaps this is why the ancient Egyptians deliberately opted not to have the leap year—so
that their slipping calendar could also work for long-term Sothic dates.
Providence would have it that a Roman citizen named Censorinus visited Egypt in the third century CE and
witnessed the festivities in Alexandria that marked the start of a new Sothic cycle. This is what he reported: “The
beginnings of these [Sothic] years are always reckoned from the first day of that month which is called by the Egyptians
Thoth, which happened this year [239 CE] upon the 7th of the kalends of July [June 25]. For a hundred years ago from
the present year [139 CE] the same fell upon the 12th of the kalends of August [July 21], on which day Canicula [Sirius]
regularly rises in Egypt.” 60
To put it more simply, the Egyptian New Year’s Day (1 Thoth of the Egyptian calendar) recoincided with the
heliacal rising of Sirius in the year 139 CE. *56 Egypt was at that time a dominion of Rome and was ruled by Emperor
Antonius Pius. This calendrical-astronomical event was clearly regarded as having great importance and was
commemorated on a coin at Alexandria bearing the Greek word AION, implying the end or start of an era. At any rate,
this information provided modern chronologists with an anchor date from which they could easily work out the start of
previous Sothic cycles by simply subtracting increments of 1,460 years from 139 CE. Thus we know that Sothic cycles
began on 1321 BCE, 2781 BCE, 4241 BCE, and so forth. Yet do the Sothic cycles hark back ad infinitum, or is there a
Year Zero, as in other calendrical systems?
Even though the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with the idea of eternity, they also believed in a beginning of a
secular time they called Zep Tepi, literally, the First Time. The British Egyptologist Rundle T. Clark comes tantalizingly
close to the very heart of ancient Egyptian cosmogony when he writes that all rituals and feasts, most of which were
linked to the cycle of the year, were “a repetition of an event that took place at the beginning of the world.” 61 According
to Clark,
This epoch—zep tepi—“the First Time”—stretched from the first stirring of the High God in the Primeval Waters. .
. . All proper myths relate events or manifestations of this epoch. Anything whose existence or authority had to be
justified or explained must be referred to the “First Time.” This was true for natural phenomena, rituals, royal
insignia, the plans of temples, magical or medical formulae, the hieroglyphic system of writing, the calendar—the
whole paraphernalia of the civilization . . . all that was good or efficacious was established on the principles laid
down in the “First Time”—which was, therefore, a golden age of absolute perfection . . . 62
The start of Sothic cycles, as we have seen, can be computed simply by moving backward or forward in increments
of 1,460 years using Censorinus’s anchor point of 139 CE. At the resulting years of Sothic cycles, the heliacal rising of