Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt
Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt
Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt
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additon, according to Malville and the other authors, “<strong>The</strong> circle is too small to have functioned as a precise sighting<br />
device. <strong>The</strong> centre lines <strong>of</strong> the two windows have azimuths <strong>of</strong> 358° and 62°. Taking into account refraction, we<br />
estimate the azimuth <strong>of</strong> the first gleam <strong>of</strong> the summer solstice Sun 6,000 years before the present to have been 63.2°,<br />
which would have been visible through the slots <strong>of</strong> the circle.” 17<br />
Figure 3.1. Approximate map <strong>of</strong> Calendar Circle showing the solstice gates and the meridian gates. Upper image is the<br />
Calendar Circle in its ruined state in 2008.<br />
Although we can say that the ancient builders intended the circle’s southeast gate to point to the rising sun on the<br />
longest day <strong>of</strong> the year, it is nonetheless an approximate alignment; the width <strong>of</strong> the gate varies 2 degrees in either<br />
direction and thus cannot be used for dating purposes with the sunrise because the changes in Earth obliquity over the<br />
past six thousand years is much less than 2 degrees. As a matter <strong>of</strong> fact, the approximate solstice alignment <strong>of</strong> the<br />
Calendar Circle is as valid today as it was six thousand years ago. It is also an exaggeration to call the stone circle a<br />
calendar simply because it has an alignment to the summer solstice. Indeed, neither the solstice gate nor the stone circle<br />
as a whole can be used as a calendar in the modern sense <strong>of</strong> the word. Further, although we, too, call it a Calendar Circle<br />
here, it seems that Malville’s Nabta Playa tag <strong>of</strong> “six-thousand-year-old calendar” was more influenced by the nearby<br />
excavations that contained artifacts that could be radiocarbon analyzed and were dated to this epoch than by the<br />
astronomical alignments <strong>of</strong> the stones. Actually, the only real astronomy that can be derived from the 1998 Nature letter<br />
is that Nabta Playa is located near the Tropic <strong>of</strong> Cancer, implying that the standing stones would cast no shadows at noon<br />
on the summer solstice (June 21), a feature that modern achaeoastronomers <strong>of</strong>ten considered as significant to ancient<br />
cultures. 18 Thus according to Malville and colleagues, “At this latitude, the Sun crosses the zenith on two days,<br />
approximately three weeks before and after the summer solstice. Vertical structures cast no shadows under the zenith<br />
Sun, and within the tropics the day <strong>of</strong> the zenith Sun is <strong>of</strong>ten regarded as a significant event.” 19<br />
Truthfully, the only actual astronomy reported in the Nature letter was that a small stone circle had an approximate<br />
solstice alignment and stood near the Tropic <strong>of</strong> Cancer. This fact, on its own, was not extremely impressive. As one<br />
prize-winning archaeoastronomer put it recently at the annual meeting <strong>of</strong> the American Astronomical Society, “you can<br />
be a primitive ape man and make a solstice alignment!” implying that scholars should start with the assumption that the<br />
people <strong>of</strong> Nabta Playa were simply primitive brutes. Yet all paleoanthropologists agree that the human brain ten thousand<br />
or more years ago was essentially identical to our own brain, and, as pr<strong>of</strong>essor emeritus Archibald Roy <strong>of</strong> Glasgow<br />
University <strong>of</strong>ten remarks, “there were Einsteins and Newtons then,” geniuses who were just as quick-thinking and astute<br />
as we are today but who had to apply their intelligence without the science and technology that we have. It is true that<br />
setting a few stones in rough alignment to the summer solstice did not require the power <strong>of</strong> an Enstein or a Newton, so<br />
what were the anthropologists <strong>of</strong> Nabta Playa really so excited about—as the 1998 Nature letter clearly implied? Apart<br />
from being perhaps the oldest astronomical site in the world, is it possible that something else at Nabta Playa had hinted<br />
to them that at the site there was much more there than meets the eye—which they were not yet ready to disclose?<br />
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