IN COMES ARCHAEOASTRONOMY
In the past forty years or so there has been a growing interest in the new scientific field of archaeoastronomy, which, according to one school of thought, is defined as the study of the astronomies, astrologies, and cosmologies, as well as the alignments of monuments and buildings of ancient cultures. This scientific discipline has emerged as a new tool for archaeology, because it has become more apparent in recent years that the cyclical motions of the stars, sun, moon, and planets were very much an integral part of the religious ideologies of ancient cultures and that ancient peoples applied such ideas to the design and alignment of their monuments. It is thus imperative to bring in the science of naked-eye observational astronomy as a necessary instrument in order to understand fully the meaning of the design, alignments, and sometimes the choice of location of ancient temples, pyramids, and even whole cities. For example, according to E. C. Krupp:
The cosmos itself is what mattered to our ancestors. Their lives, their beliefs, their destinies—all were part of this bigger pageant. Just as the environment of their temples was made sacred by metaphors of cosmic order, entire cities and great ritual centres were also astronomically aligned and organised. Each sacred capital restated the theme of cosmic order in terms of its builders’ own perception of the universe. Principles, which the society considered its own—which ordered its life and gave it its character—were borrowed from the sky and built into the plans of the cities.7
A sort of stillborn precursor of modern archaeoastronomy can be found in the turbulent intellectual milieu that swirled through the French intelligentsia at the turn of the nineteenth century after Napoleon, in 1799, took a cadre of top scientists and scholars along with his army on their adventurous military campaigns through Egypt. Napoleon also took along artists to record the journeys in sketches. One such artist, Vivant Denon, was fascinated by a zodiac sculpted onto the ceiling of a temple at Dendera. In Paris, Denon published as a book his sketch of the Dendera zodiac along with an account of his travels, and it became a huge bestseller in both France and England. In the important scientific and scholarly societies of Paris there arose a protracted and very active debate focusing on attempts to date the Dendera zodiac. One camp was composed of scientific luminaries of the time, many of whose names are familiar to any student of science today. These scientists often gathered at the home of the Marquis de LaPlace. Particularly active in the Dendera zodiac debate were physicists Jean-Baptiste Biot and Joseph Fourier, astronomer Johan Karl Burckhardt, and his engineer partner Jean-Baptiste Coraboeuf. The approach that all in this camp followed in order to attempt to date the zodiac was to match calculations of the astronomical precession of the equinoxes with the images of constellations on the Dendera zodiac. They followed the reasoning of pre–French Revolutionary scholar Charles Dupuis, who had based his study of the origins of religion on interpreting religious mythologies in astronomical terms. As California Institute of Technology historian of science Jed Z. Buchald puts it,
Dupuis had located the birthplace of the zodiac in an Egypt older by far than any chronology based on textual arguments—and especially on the Books of Moses—could possibly allow. (Standard biblical chronology placed the origin of all things at about 4000 BC. . . .) According to Dupuis, the zodiac, and astronomy itself, was born near the Nile over 14,000 years ago. The Greeks, he insisted, were scientific children compared to the Egyptians, whose knowledge and wisdom underlay all of Western science and mathematics.8
The scientists competed fiercely, often disagreeing with each other. For example, Biot seems to have enjoyed pointing out that Fourier, famous for his mathematics, had miscalculated the heliacal rising of Sirius. Yet they all used precession calculations to date the Dendera zodiac. One thing that hampered them and that is still uncertain today was that it is not clear how much of the Dendera zodiac is representative of actual events in the sky and how much of it is merely symbolic horoscope. This gets at the heart of the other camp in the zodiac-dating debates of the time: the philologists and linguists who argued that astrophysical calculations should not be applied, because all ancient symbology is best understood as an expression of the cultural lives of the ancients, not as a representation of the physical world.
Stirring even more the turbulence of the debate was that many French intellectuals, such as Dupuis, had little use for biblical fundamentalism, while others believed all scholarship should be firmly based on interpreting biblical Mosaic (emphasizing the Books of Moses) chronology. One of these was the young Jean-Francois Champollion.
Meanwhile, a French antiquities collector named Saulnier had dispatched a master stonemason named Lelorrain on an expedition to Dendera to steal the zodiac. After using stone saws and chisels and finally dynamite, Lelorrain managed to cart the remains of the temple ceiling back to Paris. These remains, however, did not include the parts of the ceiling that ended up winning the Dendera zodiac debates. In September 1822, Champollion, after years of poverty-stricken excruciating efforts,9 finally cracked the code for how to decipher hieroglyphs. Champollion first deciphered the cartouches that contain royal names. (A cartouche is an oval enclosure in which the name of a pharaoh is inscribed. Only a king’s name can be written within a cartouche.) Among the first cartouches he deciphered were those next to the Dendera zodiac. There he read the ancient Greek word for “ruler,” thus dating the construction of the zodiac ceiling to the Ptolemaic period and winning the debate for the side of the philologists, who could happily boot the physicists and astronomers out of the circle of those considered able to offer legitimate authority about antiquity.
Yet in what must be one of the great ironies of history, in 1828, when Champollion had the resources finally to mount his own expedition and he arrived at Dendera to see his famous cartouches, he was horrified to find them empty. They never had contained any hieroglyphs, no royal names at all. It seems the artists with Napoleon’s army, who were often quite accurate in their depictions, in this case had been puzzled by the strange, empty cartouches and had sketched something in them simply for artistic reasons. By the time of Champollion’s trip, however, the philologists had consolidated their authoritative hold on antiquities studies enough to keep the physical scientists at bay for some time. Further, as it turned out, Champollion’s date was not far off anyway.*2
Eventually, we would have a new mode of historical understanding stemming from neither the extreme philologist-linguist camp nor the extreme physicist-astronomer camp, but a synthetic approach including many forms of evidence—archaeological, artistic, linguistic, and astronomical—that would come into play.
Because he began to employ such a synthetic approach, the father of archaeoastronomy may legitimately be the British astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer. Lockyer was born in 1836 in Rugby, England. As a young man, he had worked for the War Office in London, and it was there that he first developed a keen interest in astronomy. In 1862 Lockyer was made a fellow at the Royal Astronomical Society, and, in 1868, while working at the College of Chemistry in London, he made his first major contribution to science by showing that the bright emissions from the sun during a total eclipse were caused by an unknown element he named “helium”—twenty-seven years before Sir William Ramsay would isolate this gas in the laboratory! In 1869 Lockyer made another important contribution to science: he founded the journal Nature, which was to become the most influential scientific periodical in the world. Further, in 1885 Lockyer became the world’s first professor of astronomical physics. For his many discoveries and achievements, Lockyer was knighted in 1897.
At the age of fifty-three, toward the end of his academic career, Lockyer indulged in his greatest passion: the study of the astronomies of ancient cultures and the alignments of their temples. He realized that archaeologists had not “paid any heed to the possible astronomical ideas of the temple builders”10 and, furthermore, that “there was little doubt that astronomical consideration had a great deal to do with the direction towards which these temple
s faced.”11 He had read of the magnificent pyramids and temples of ancient Egypt, and so, in November 1890, Lockyer went there to see them for himself. In Cairo he was assisted by the German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch, an authority on astronomical inscriptions and drawings found in temples and tombs of pharaohs and noblemen. During a meeting with Lockyer, Brugsch explained that the rituals and ceremonies of ancient Egyptians clearly contained astronomical connotations. Encouraged by this, Lockyer sailed to Luxor. There he studied the alignment and symbolism of several temples, including the great temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak. Back in England, Lockyer published his findings in The Dawn of Astronomy. It was the first book of its kind, and, taking into account the incomplete and rudimentary knowledge of Egyptologists at that time, Lockyer’s work is a remarkable achievement that brought to attention the importance of applying astronomy to the studies of ancient cultures. Yet even though Lockyer’s approach was highly scientific and his arguments sound, nearly all Egyptologists either ignored or rudely derided his thesis. Like Galileo before him, who calmly told his inquisitors “but it [Earth] does move . . .” (e pur si muove), poor Lockyer told the Egyptologists “of all the large temples I examined there was an astronomical basis . . .”12 His words fell on deaf ears. In the years that followed, the Egyptologists took refuge in their belief that by having silenced Lockyer and having thrown him off their turf, they had shaken off all those pseudoscientists, dilettantes, and hangers-on who dared to oppose their views. For a while it did seem that they had succeeded.
In 1963, however, another archaeoastronomer came to haunt them again with a vengeance: the American professor Gerald Hawkins of the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hawkins infuriated archaeologists by publishing in Lockyer’s now highly influential academic journal Nature a series of articles on the vexed topic of the alleged astronomy of Stonehenge, and he followed the articles with the publication of his now-renowned book Stonehenge Decoded. Hawkins went much further than Lockyer: he claimed that the alignments at Stonehenge were definitely astronomical and had been deliberately aimed at the sun and moon azimuths (positions at rising and setting). He also asserted that the fifty-six holes of the so-called Aubrey Circle were representative of the fifty-six years of the moon’s full eclipse cycle of three nodal revolutions of 18.61 years each. The implications were huge. This interpretation meant that the ancient builders of Stonehenge, far from being primitives and illiterate barbarians, were sophisticated astronomers who also knew that Earth was a sphere or globe. This, of course, was pure anathema to the archaeologists, and soon they were again up in arms. As our colleague and friend John Anthony West once remarked:
There are few things in this world more predictable than the reaction of conventional minds to unconventional ideas. That reaction is always and invariably some combination of contempt, outrage, abuse and derision. . . . However, this standard reaction may be seriously muted or further enhanced by a potent new wild card, added to the deck only in the latter half of the twentieth century: the PR factor. If the unconventional idea attracts wide public interest, that is to say if it is easily understood and is “sexy” enough; especially if it results in bestselling books, extensive TV coverage or movie blockbusters, the attack gets ratcheted up. . . . As long as the public interest is there, Hollywood and television can be relied upon to keep stirring the pot no matter what the “experts” say. And sooner or later the cynics, skeptics and debunkers at the New York Times, Scientific American and Skeptical Inquirer will be forced to confront the offending idea.13
This time, however, they faced a less accommodating opponent than the passive Sir Lockyer. Hawkins’s book became a bestseller, and, with his solid academic reputation, the archaeologists had much trouble quenching the huge interest and support Hawkins received from the public and media. Hawkins had singlehandedly forced the scholars out of their ivory towers and made them face up to the challenge. What made matters even worse for the skeptics was the support that he received from academic heavyweights such as Sir Fred Hoyle, who not only confirmed Hawkins’s calculations but also agreed that “a veritable Newton or Einstein must have been at work”14 at Stonehenge three millennia ago.
Hawkins was soon followed by a Scotsman, Alexander Thom, an engineer with a keen interest in the ancient megaliths and prehistoric monuments of the British Isles. After years of meticulous investigation of the astronomical alignments of these ancient sites, Thom was convinced that all were the collective work of a pan-generation construction program that reached its pinnacle in 1850 BCE. He was able to show that many of the megalithic sites incorporated a common canon of geometry and mathematics that resembled what was supposedly invented by the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece—yet they appeared in the British Isles more than a millennium earlier! According to Thom, the dimensions of the prehistoric sites were determined by a common unit of measurement, about 2.72 feet in length, which he termed the megalithic yard. Thom proposed that these sites were meant to express magical ideas and symbolize important belief systems by making use of astronomical observations of the sun, moon, and stars.
This time, some archaeologists took notice with uneasy embarrassment, for it was becoming obvious that their elderly peers, in their zeal to defend their coveted turf, might have been too hasty in rejecting the research of Lockyer, Hawkins, and Hoyle. Alexander Thom’s impeccable data and the razor-sharp mathematical logic in his book Megalithic Sites in Britain could not be ignored by unbiased archaeologists. Thom also managed to have articles published in the reputable and peer-reviewed Journal of the History of Astronomy, which gave much credence to his ideas. It seemed that, finally, the new science of archaeoastronomy had made a crack in the wall of archaeology.
Since Alexander Thom’s days, the science of archaeoastronomy has gained much ground and popularity among the public and even with some Egyptologists and archaeologists of the new generation. Starting in the late 1960s, serious investigators began to feel more comfortable coming forward with their ideas on the astronomical alignments of ancient Egyptian temples and pyramids. The first major breakthrough came with the astronomer Virginia Trimble, who codiscovered the stellar alignments of the shafts in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid in 1963. This discovery opened the way for more research on the Egyptian pyramids and also encouraged others to come forth and brave the firewall of academic Egyptology.15 Today many new players have entered this fascinating field of research, mostly because computer and satellite technology such as Google Earth, GPS, and user-friendly astronomy software have allowed amateurs to investigate ancient sites on a screen in the comfort of their office or home. Further, with the arrival of the Internet coupled with the exponential growth of computer and digital technology and electronic communication with easy access to downloading scientific publications, research on ancient cultures is no longer the monopoly of closed-door archaeological institutions or university and museum departments. Even so, Egyptologists and archaeologists still pull rank when new ideas threaten to topple their coveted applecart. We speak from our own experience when we published The Orion Mystery in 1994 and, later, in 2002, The Origin Map. We too endured from Egyptologists and archaeologists the all-too-familiar war of words and the debunking that is passed off as criticism.
There are, nonetheless, signs of a growing acceptance that connections do exist between astronomy and the orientation, alignments, and location of ancient sites. In 1981 the First International Conference on Archaeoastronomy was held at Oxford, in England, where astronomical alignments of temples were discussed openly and seriously. Then, in 1983, there took place the First International Conference on Ethnoastronomy at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1993 the world’s attention was galvanized by the German engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink and his daring exploration with a miniature robot of the star shafts in the Queen’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza and his stunning discovery of doors at their ends. Finally, in 2002, National Geographic staged a live television event in an attempt to ope
n the Gantenbrink doors in the Great Pyramid. An estimated six hundred million viewers around the world saw the program. Thanks to the persistence of a new breed of archaeoastronomers such as Archie Roy of Glasgow University, Giulio Magli of Milano Politecnico, Edwin Krupp of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, Anthony Aveni of Colgate University, Alex Gurstein of the International Astronomical Union, and Juan Belmonte of the Tenerife Observatory to name but a few, archaeoastronomy has now become an important aspect in the understanding of ancient cultures. Today a few major universities around the world have added new chairs for archaeoastronomy, and more scholarly papers, articles, and books are being published by professional archaeoarstronomers and serious amateurs alike. All this has caused a a large crack in the wall of Egyptology—and archaeoastronomy has slipped in to stand beside conventional archaeology as a major tool to study the pyramids, temples, texts, and tomb drawings of the pharaohs.
So when Kim Malville, a professor emeritus of astrophysics and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado, arrived at Nabta Playa in late 1997, he was greeted not by the usual tongue-in-cheek reception, which might previously have been expected from Egyptologists and archaeologists, but with a genuinely collegial reception and a great hope that he could help solve the mystery of the stone alignments there. At this point everyone working at Nabta Playa must have felt that under their feet was a potential intellectual and political time bomb, not only because of its great antiquity but also because of what Malville was there to confirm. Before we go into this, however, we must understand better why the CPE made the mistake of leaving out of their research and investigation the regions of Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uwainat, for even with the problem of their great distance from Nabta Playa, it should have been obvious that they were in some way related to the ancient people who developed Nabta Playa. Let us review, then, where and when this intriguing story of the Egyptian Sahara really began. Surprisingly, it was not in Egypt but in the dimly lit corridors of Balliol College, Oxford, England.
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