Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

3. Sirius also coordinated simultaneously with the star Dubhe in the Big Dipper so that their alignments formed an
approximate 90-degree angle. (This curious connection also had been noted by Wendorf and Malville; they
commented that the megalith builders of Nabta Playa had “a fascination with right angles.”) 13
This possible simultaneous observation of Sirius in the east and the star Dubhe in the north was of particular
interest, because we know from our studies of ancient Egypt that the very same simultaneous observation of Sirius and
Dubhe was performed in the alignment rituals of pyramids and temples since the beginning of the pharaonic civilization.
This encouraged us to test for the simultaneous observation of Sirius and Dubhe at Nabta Playa, where we found a
remarkably accurate and consistent repetition of this pattern of observation. Indeed, an observer at Nabta Playa in about
4500 BCE would have noted immediately that the stars Dubhe and Sirius could be aligned simultaneously with megalith
lines A1 and B1, for precisely when Sirius appeared to rise on the eastern horizon and was thus aligned with megalith line
B1, the star Dubhe could be seen in the northern sky, directly above megalith line A1 (at an altitude of 33 degrees).
Yet could this be a coincidence? We needed to find further evidence that this was the deliberate intention of the
ancient astronomer-priests in order to eliminate the possibility that simple haphazard was at play in the observations. We
found that the same simultaneous observation of Sirius and Dubhe with the same right-angle separation took place with
two other megalith lines—A3 and B2. This not only confirmed the deliberate intent of the ancient astronomer-priests to
delineate this particular simultaneous observation but also proved that they tracked the stars across several generations,
from at least 4500 BCE to 3500 BCE. Further, it meant that they were aware of precession and even tracked its effect
more than three millennia before the Greeks were supposed to have discovered it. Clearly, the people of Nabta Playa were
anything but primitive.
The simultaneous alignments of Sirius and Dubhe at Nabta Playa were amazingly precise for the context and
conditions of that distant epoch. *16 Using our measures of the average azimuths of the megaliths lines, we found that
today the angle made between lines B1 and A1 is 91.11 degrees, and the angle between lines B2 and A3 is 91.65 degrees.
Precessing the sky back to 4500 BCE, we calculated that the azimuth difference between Sirius and Dubhe when the
former was on the horizon was 91.2 degrees. Moving forward in time to about 3500 BCE, the azimuth difference
became 91.5 degrees; so the stars matched the stones uncannily well at both dates, which were a thousand years apart. In
addition, Dubhe, with a declination of 66.9 degrees in approximately 3500 BCE, had just become an eternal circumpolar
star as viewed from Nabta Playa—which means that on its daily journey around the celestial pole, at its lowest point in
the sky, Dubhe due north was just skimming the horizon before rising back into the sky to travel around the celestial pole
again. This may be significant with regard to why the Neolithic builders monumentalized specifically this date in the
alignment.
So far we have explained four alignments of the six megalith lines—A1, A3, B1, and B2—and have found that they
work in pairs so that A1 and B1 and A3 and B2 define simultaneous right-angle observations of Sirius and Dubhe in
4500 BCE and 3500 BCE, respectively. Still left to review, however, are lines C1 and A2. In their original reports
Malville and Wendorf claimed that line C1 had targeted Sirius in 4820 BCE and that line A2 had targeted Dubhe in 4423
BCE. Yet according to our corrected azimuths for these lines, we determined the date for Sirius to be 6100 BCE, which
matched, at a simultaneous right angle at that date, not Dubhe but another bright star in the Big Dipper called Alkaid,
located directly over line A2 at an altitude of 22 degrees, when Sirius would have appeared precisely on the horizon and
in alignment to line C1. In other words the megalith lines C1 and A2 worked in exactly the same way as the pairs B1 and
A1 and B2 and A3 but at the much earlier date of 6100 BCE. We nonetheless asked ourselves why Sirius was observed
simultaneously with Alkaid in 6100 BCE, but much later, in 4500 BCE and 3500 BCE, Alkaid was replaced with
Dubhe. We will see in chapter 6 that part of the answer, as amazing as it might seem, can be found at the step pyramid
complex of Djoser at Saqqara, near modern Cairo and some 1,000 kilometers (about 621 miles) away from Nabta Playa.
King djoser and Alkaid
At the step pyramid complex is the so-called serdab monument in which is found a statue of King Djoser gazing through
peepholes toward the star Alkaid in the north at the precise moment when the star Sirius rose in the east. Perhaps the
correspondence at Nabta Playa may explain why King Djoser chose to monumentalize himself peering at Alkaid (with
Sirius rising) rather than peering at Dubhe. At Djoser’s complex in Saqqara (ca. 2650 BCE ), Dubhe was at altitude 32.5