Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

The vernal equinox heliacal rising of a star is also essentially the halfway mark between the star’s northern culmination
when it is seen farthest north on Earth and the star’s southern culmination about thirteen thousand years later, when it is
seen farthest south on Earth. As the people of Nabta Playa used and constructed the playa basin to teach about, study,
and employ in ritual ceremony the starry sky and heavens, there were certainly smaller, temporary stone constructions
there all the time. When the primary asterism they used to conceptualize how the sky moves, Orion’s belt, passed that
special time in its cycle—vernal equinox heliacal rising—the time was best to create monumental megalithic alignments
that would last through the ages. At the time of the height of the Calendar Circle at Nabta Playa, Orion’s belt and Sirius
were separated in declination, and so rising azimuth, by an angle of less than 2 degrees. Consequently, they passed
horizon alignments separated by only a couple of hundred years.
Figure 4.9. Left, the Sirius plus Alkaid alignment ca. 6100 BCE; right, the Orion stars and Vega depicted at one date ca.
6270 BCE. From that epoch, the Orion stars all move through vernal equinox heliacal risings, as the Vega rising line
moves southeast over the megalith alignments.
Another association with the date of 6100 BCE is that the rising of the bright circumpolar star Vega was in line with
the A2 megaliths as Orion’s belt began rising over the C1 line. *20
Figure 4.10. The star-studded ceiling in Tepi I pyramid at Saqqara (Sixth Dynasty)
In summary, at Nabta Playa in 4500 BCE and 3500 BCE there were megalith alignments (B1 and B2) oriented to
the rising of Sirius that ran eastward (as suggested by Malville and his coauthors in 2007), and we have shown that these
alignments were used simultaneously with—and formed right angles with—megalith alignments (A1 and A3) to the star
Dubhe, which ran northward. It also seems that in 6100 BCE megalith alignment C1 was directed to the rising of Sirius,
which was used simultaneously with the star Alkaid in the north. In addition, in 6200 BCE line C1 may also have been