Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

ALIGNMENTS TOWARD THE STARS: WHEN AND WHY?
Malville concluded that the megalithic alignments had been intended to point to the rising place of important stars on the
horizon in the late Neolithic period. He proposed that the three alignments going north tracked the star Dubhe at 4742
BCE, at 4423 BCE, and at 4199 BCE. Of the set of three alignments going east, one was aimed at Sirius about 4820
BCE and the two others tracked the stars of Orion’s belt at 4176 BCE and 3786 BCE. What Malville had determined,
even though he did not spell it out himself, was that the ancient builders were tracking the precessional shift of important
stars over several centuries, perhaps even millennia.
At this stage, however, we must quickly point out that though one of the functions of the megalithic alignments was
to act as trackers of the changing rising points of stars on the horizon across the epochs, it is important to note that the
dates allocated by Malville to the alignments are in error due to the miscalculation of the azimuths made in the 2001
report 32 —errors that have since been corrected. 33 Further, although the 2005 corrected azimuth readings gave much
earlier dates for the tracking of the stars, and although Malville agreed on the corrections, he did not then apply those
dates but instead proposed a set of different stars to fit his original (incorrect) dates. At this point we and Malville parted
ways in the interpretation of these alignments. We chose to retain the original stars proposed by Malville—Dubhe, *6
Sirius, and those of Orion’s belt—for as we will see in chapter 4 these stars no doubt made far more sense to the
prehistoric people of Nabta Playa. In addition, chapter 6 shows how this prehistoric star lore was eventually passed on to
the ancient Egyptians, who built the pyramids, and how especially the bright star Sirius became the star par excellence of
the pharaohs.