Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

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