Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

ceremonial complex of Nabta Playa. The only way to resolve this issue was to examine DWM ourselves.
In early April 2008, the desert explorer Mahmoud Marai, a close colleague and friend of Carlo Bergmann, organized
an expedition for us to visit the DWM, among other sites in the Egyptian Sahara. We started off-road near Dakhla oasis
and headed south, and, after a couple of hours of bumpy riding in Marai’s well-equipped Toyota Landcruiser, we reached
DWM late in the afternoon. Because it was fast growing dark, we decided to set up camp and wait until dawn to climb
the small escarpment that led to the hieroglyphs and petroglyphs on the east side of the mound. We were up before the
crack of dawn the next day, and after a swift breakfast of hot tea and biscuits, we made our way 10 meters (about 33 feet)
up the man-made escarpment and reached a platform, also man-made, that brought us level with the inscriptions.
The most prominent of the inscriptions is at the center of the east face of the mound. As we saw in chapter 2, it
consists of a royal cartouche that bears the name of the pharaoh Djedefre, which is enclosed in a rectangle with two
protrusions at the top that Egyptologists have assumed to be a form of the hieroglyph for “mountain” (see plate 2). As we
have seen, a similar sign, but with a sun disk between the protrusions, was used to denote “horizon” or, more specifically,
the Place of Sunrise. Because DWM faced east—the place of sunrise—it seemed to us more apt to regard this mound not
as Water Mountain but rather as a sun temple. There was, however, one snag with this hypothesis: the view toward the
eastern horizon was blocked by an elongated hill about 200 meters (about 256 feet) east of DWM.
This elongated hill or mesa is about 70 meters (230 feet) long and 12 meters (39 feet) high and has a flattened top
with a very noticeable depression or notch in the middle. As far as we could tell, neither Bergmann nor the German
scholars who studied DWM saw this hill as significant, but as we watched the sun rise over it, it became apparent to us
that the hill was positioned in such a way that it would act as a sighting device for marking the yearly course of the sun
and the two solstices and two equinoxes. We named this mesa Horizon Hill. Using our GPS and electronic compass, we
determined that at the equinoxes the sun would rest in the notch in the center of Horizon Hill, creating the hieroglyph
We were at DWM on April 9. We established the location as 25.40 degrees north and that sunrise on that day would
be 82.09 degrees on the horizon and 83.35 degrees when breaking at 7:06 a.m. over Horizon Hill (which we estimated to
be at 2.75 degrees altitude above the geometric horizon). Figure 4.13 shows the view from DWM with the sun breaking
over Horizon Hill. We calculated that at spring equinox (March 21), the sun will be at azimuth 91.2 degrees when it
breaks over the notch on Horizon Hill, which matches the actual azimuth of the notch as seen from DWM.
We took GPS measures in front of the central cartouche on the sun temple and also on top of Horizon Hill. On the
hill we took measurements on flat areas near the north and south ends of the hilltop and at the notch near the center. The
measurements we took gave azimuths of 77.9 degrees, 91.1 degrees, and 106.7 degrees, respectively, as viewed from the
central cartouche on the east face of the sun temple. We also measured the flat area of Horizon Hill and determined it to
be 8 meters (26 feet) higher in elevation than the central cartouche on the sun temple, and it was positioned some 170
meters (558 feet) east of the sun temple. We thus estimated that the hypothesized solar notch was at altitude 2.7 degrees
above the geometric horizon when viewed on Horizon Hill. We calculate that at equinox the sun would indeed be resting
in the notch at 2.7 degrees altitude and azimuth 91.2 degrees when appearing over Horizon Hill. At the summer and
winter solstices and at the same altitude of 2.7 degrees, the sun would be at azimuths 63.3 degrees and 117.7 degrees,
respectively. Because we photographed the notch in situ as we took the GPS point there, our measure of the azimuth of
the notch is very precise and accurately coincides with the equinox sun when it breaks over Horizon Hill. Yet we
recognize that our azimuth measurements of the solstice sunrises at the north and south edges of Horizon Hill are less
precise, because we did not have an independent calibrating marker. On a future visit we hope to refine our measurement
of the two edges of Horizon Hill with respect to the solstice paths of the sun.