C1 125.4 degrees (2001) 130.1 degrees Sirius rising ca. 6100 BCE, with Alkaid at line A2; also, Orion’s belt at vernal equinox heliacal rising ca. same epoch
We can see from this table that the megalithic alignments at Nabta Playa represent a coherent and consistent ensemble that has meaning when it is deciphered with astronomy. Clearly the alignments, instead of being random, are carefully made to target the rising of stars that were important ritualistically and also practically to the ancient people of Nabta Playa. The anthropologists of the CPE as well as other archaeoastronomers who have carefully studied this site are all in agreement: Nabta Playa was an important ceremonial center that required considerable complex social organization, physical effort, and resources to construct and maintain over a long period of time. It thus is sensible to conclude that embodied in the design of the ceremonial complex is some very high meaning that can be read with astronomy. As we will see later this system of knowledge—we can perhaps call it star knowledge—at Nabta Playa was carried forward in time and space to the pharaonic civilization of the Nile Valley. Meanwhile we’ll take an initial look at a well-known star ritual from ancient Egypt that shows how and why Sirius and a star in the Big Dipper, Dubhe, were used simultaneously to align sacred megalithic monuments from earliest times harking back to 3200 BCE and perhaps even earlier . . . just as they were used at Nabta Playa.
A RIGHT ANGLE AND TWO STARS
The simultaneous observation of Sirius rising in the east and a star of the Big Dipper in the northern sky is a strong, nontangible piece of evidence that shows a direct link between the prehistory of the Sahara and the archaic period of ancient Egypt and the great civilization that ensued from it. At one end of this link is the ceremonial complex of Nabta Playa and at the other end is the earliest ceremonial complex in the Nile Valley on the Island of Elephantine near Aswan. In chapter 6 we will look directly at this link, but for now we will look at an important early Egyptian ritual known as stretching the cord, because it is likely that in this lies the very source of why and how the simultaneous observation of two stars was used by the Egyptians and, earlier, by the people of Nabta Playa in association with the astronomical alignment of megalithic structures.
The ancient Egyptian texts and temple reliefs explain that stretching the cord was carried out by a priestess, who represented a deity associated with the stars, and the pharaoh. Both the priestess and pharaoh held a rod and a mallet, and a rope or cord was looped between the rods. The priestess stood with her back to the northern sky and faced the pharaoh. This scene is depicted on many temples, and the texts alongside it tell us that the pharaoh observed the trajectory of the stars with his eye in order to establish the temple in the manner of ancient times. In the texts we are unequivocally told that the king looked at a star in the Big Dipper (called Mesekhtiu, the Bull’s Thigh). Some of the texts, however, mention the star Sirius and imply that it also was somehow involved in the ritual.
Exactly how was this stellar alignment ritual performed? Was the king aiming his gaze at a star in the Big Dipper while, simultaneously, the priestess announced the moment of the rising of Sirius, after which the cord between them was stretched and the rods were hammered into the soil, thus fixing the axis of the future temple? A further clue to the ritual is that the pharaoh observed carefully the motion of a star in real time. Inscriptions on the Temple of Horus at Edfu, accompanying portrayals of the ritual, quote the pharaoh: “I take the measuring cord in the company of Seshat. I consider the progressive movement of the stars. My eye is fixed on the Bull’s Thigh constellation. I count off time, scrutinizing the clock . . .” 15 This is also what might have happened at the ceremonial center of Nabta Playa thousands of years earlier. An observer who was standing at Complex Structure A held a rod with a rope attached to it. Another observer, also holding a rod, stood some twenty paces north of the first observer with his or her back to the Big Dipper. This second observer then waited for Sirius to rise, and, at that precise moment, he or she gave the signal to the first observer to stretch the cord and aim it toward a star in the Big Dipper. Then, when the alignment was achieved, the first observer was to fix the rod in the soil. Later, a row of megaliths would be set along this alignment. On another day, this ritual was repeated to set an alignment toward the rising spot of Sirius on the horizon as seen from CSA. Thus the two lines of stone work together, one going north (line A) and the other southeast (line B). This interpretation is consistent with the ancient texts that describe that the Dubhe alignment required real-time observing of the star in the sky, whereas Sirius rising on the horizon is more easily set. These two lines also form a rough right angle, a feature that surely would have been noticed and intriguing.
The relation of Dubhe and Sirius
We can go back in time to approximately 9000 BCE , when the north celestial pole is near the shoulders of the constellation Hercules. Dubhe rises many hours before Sirius and is very high in the sky when Sirius rises, and Dubhe’s declination is so far from north that Dubhe and the whole Bull’s Thigh constellation are far from being circumpolar stars. If we turn the clock forward to around 4500 BCE , the celestial pole has moved so that it is close to the Bull’s Thigh constellation, Dubhe has moved north in declination to become a circumpolar star, and Dubhe is decreasing in altitude so that it is at only 33 degrees altitude when Sirius rises, as seen at Nabta. The low altitude of Dubhe when Sirius is on the horizon means that the angular separation of the two stars in the sky is essentially preserved in the angle of their alignments on the ground.
Figure 4.11. The right-angled megalith alignments of Sirius and Dubhe at 4500 BCE and at 3500 BCE as the stars moved through precession
Indeed, any architect or designer will readily agree that right angles are universally recognized by humans not least because they define, among many other things, the four cardinal directions of Earth. Sirius rising may have been marked by the star Alkaid in the Big Dipper from the seventh millennium BCE to about 4800 BCE, but after that date and until 3500 BCE the star Dubhe in the Big Dipper replaced Alkaid, and it was noticed that Dubhe and Sirius always formed a right angle. After that date, Nabta Playa and the ceremonial complex were abandoned.*22
ONE YEAR OF ASTRONOMY AT NABTA PLAYA
Now suppose you are viewing the various astronomical events during one year at Nabta Playa—say, 4500 BCE. You begin your observing year on the afternoon of the winter solstice. You intend to use the Calendar Circle that night, and so you observe that the winter solstice sun sets into the solstice gates of the circle and the sky begins to darken. You move to the north end of the circle to use the meridian gates as your sky-viewing guide, and over the next forty-five minutes the sky becomes dark enough that the stars seem to pop out around you. Then, fifty-five minutes after sunset, directly on the meridian, you see the belt of Orion shining into the deepening dark, oriented very much like the three southerly stones inside the circle. Trailing Orion is the brilliant Sirius, which crosses the meridian an hour and forty minutes later. Two hours after that the very bright star Canopus crosses the meridian, skimming low above the horizon. Perhaps, if you’ve learned your sky lessons, you know that when you travel north, Canopus drops even lower to the horizon. The starry show continues for eight more hours; then the sky begins to brighten, and the sun rises to make its low winter arc across the sky.
One month later the nightly show is similar, except that the sun sets a bit north of the solstice gates of the circle, and when the sky darkens, you see that Orion has already passed the meridian and Sirius is already there. Two more months pass, and the sun rises due east and sets due west. It is the spring equinox, and now when the sky darkens after sunset, Orion’s belt is gone—already set below the horizon—but Sirius is still visible low to the southwest for about forty-five minutes before it too sets. About ten days later Sirius also disappears.*23 Another twenty-eight days later, just before dawn, Orion’s belt reappears in the southeast.†24After another twenty-nine days, Sirius also reappears in the
southeast, when you can glimpse it momentarily before dawn.*25 At Nabta Playa you have moved south of the Calendar Circle to view this heliacal rising of Sirius from Complex Structure A, the central megalithic construction that your society built to view stars rising over lines of megaliths. There, just before dawn, you see Sirius rise above a distant line of megaliths to the southeast, and when you look to the northeast you see hovering there, above another line of megaliths, Dubhe of the Bull’s Thigh constellation.
Of course, these alignments are just as you have expected, because this is in fact a year of heavy construction, when you are completing the building of those two lines of megaliths. It is now just four weeks before summer solstice, and in seven more days, it will be exactly three weeks before summer solstice, the time when, at noon, the sun passes directly overhead and the standing stones cast no shadow, which occurs only twice per year.
Now the annual rains have come, and if they are plentiful, the playa basin fills with shallow water. The Calendar Circle is located on a low mound just off the edge of the playa, so you can continue your star viewing from there even while the playa is full of water. On the night before summer solstice you watch Orion’s belt rising about an hour after midnight, followed, as always, by Sirius an hour and forty-five minutes later. Orion’s belt moves toward the meridian and fades out of view about an hour before it reaches it, as the sky brightens and the sun rises in the solstice gates of the Calendar Circle. Three weeks after summer solstice the noon sun again passes directly overhead and the standing stones cast no shadow, and the nightly show repeats. This time you can see Orion’s belt just approaching the meridian as the sky brightens with the sunrise. The sun now rises a bit south of the solstice gate, as the sunrise location moves toward winter, and the whole annual show will repeat.
Figure 4.12. Photograph of Orion being followed by Sirius beneath the Milky Way
MORE MYSTERIES AT NABTA PLAYA
When some important and new discovery such as Nabta Playa might put into serious question the established views about the origins of civilization, there is a tendency to wait until a suitable theory can be developed before releasing any data about the discovery. The problem with this is that sometimes the data that fits an established theory is regarded as more valuable than mysterious new data that contradicts it.*26
Others, like us, take an opposing view. We see the mysterious, unexplained data as more valuable, because if we try to understand the mystery, we might learn something new. To us that is what scientific research is—or ought to be—all about. In this frame of mind, then, we will look in more detail at some mysterious aspects of Nabta Playa in the hope that such an approach might shed even more light on this mysterious place.
We recall that all the megalithic alignments at Nabta Playa radiate out from a central megalithic structure called Complex Structure A. CSA is composed of megaliths that lay on the surface; a large megalith carved by human hands (the so-called cow stone) buried 3 meters (about 10 feet); and finally, berneath the sculpted cow stone, a lump of bedrock, also partly carved by human hands. The megaliths on the surface are arranged in an oval shape, and some are partially sculpted. Two of these are partially sculpted into a curved geometric form, one into a convex form, and two into a concave form, giving the impression that they might have been chunks of a much larger structure that has now disappeared.16 The cow stone that was buried beneath was 1.9 by 1.5 by 0.7 meters (6.2 by 4.9 by 2.3 feet) and composed of hard, quartzitic sandstone weighing about 2 tons.17 Photographs of the cow stone immediately after it was excavated show that one part of the stone is finely shaped and smooth and another portion is either unfinished or was roughly flaked. According to Wendorf and Krolik, it “had a flat, possibly naturally smoothed, almost polished top. One side was convex and pecked smooth. At one end . . . there was a fan-like projection that might represent a head.” 18 From photographs and video frames of the cow stone taken after its discovery and from taking measurements of the arching of its extended outer surface, we could see that it may have been shaped like a spherical section. As we have seen, the CPE concluded that this sculpture vaguely resembled a cow.*27
As an integral part of an intensely astronomical construction linked to stellar alignments, this cow sculpture may be both bovine and supernal, both cow and star—that is, it may be symbolic astrologically. Because it was placed under CSA sometime around the start of the astrological Age of Taurus (the Bull constellation), usually assumed to be ca. 4500 BCE, then a symbolic connection to mark this age is a viable proposition.†28
Of course, it is a widely held notion that the ancient Greeks invented the zodiac signs based on their knowledge of Babylonian-Chaldean star lore from the first millennium BCE. Yet there is significant dissent among historians as to the age of the zodiacal signs, with some proposing that they may be much older than we have generally presumed.19 We can also note that several megalithic alignments emanating from CSA mark both the rising of Sirius and the Big Dipper—and the ancient Egyptians often identified the former with a cow and the latter with a bull’s thigh. Indeed the possibility of a cultural link between the cow stone at Nabta Playa and the ancient Egyptians was suggested by Wendorf when he proposed that this strange, sculpted megalith “may have been the origin of the ancient Egyptians’ fascination with working large stones.”20 Many questions regarding this cow stone remain unanswered. How was the top surface so finely polished? How were the fine, sharp, and precise curvilinear edges made? What tools could have been used by ancient people who lived before the age of metal? Unfortunately these questions may never be answered, for the cow stone was removed from Nabta Playa by the Egyptian antiquities authorities and today lies broken in the backyard storage area of the Nubian Museum in Aswan (see appendix 3). We can also recall that the cow stone itself was placed on top of another sculpture that was cut into the living bedrock of the site. This bedrock sculpture has the shape of a large, smooth disk that is about 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) across, with some of its parts and its edges carved by human hands. According to Wendorf and Krolik,
The north and west sides had been carefully shaped by removing one or two large sections that left a curved outline, following an arched bedding plane in the bedrock. The large sections removed during the shaping of the tablerock were most probably reused as the two large slabs placed in the center of the surface architecture. The top of the tablerock was flat and smoothed. It is possible this was natural smoothing . . . but this seems unlikely since none of the other table-rocks visible at the sourthern end of the Nabta Basin display similar smoothed surfaces. . . . Regardless of how the top was smoothed, the sides were clearly pecked and had a slightly re-curved outline.21
Surrounding this bedrock sculpture is a great mystery that has not been adequately investigated. How and why was it sculpted—and, more intriguingly, when was it fashioned? Wendorf initially proposed that it was created during the Late Neolithic—that is, around 5100 BCE, after the playa sediments were formed.22 Yet if so, we may wonder how the ancient people of Nabta Playa could have known where this outcrop in the bedrock was located if they could not see it, for it was totally covered by a thick layer of sediment. Wendorf and Krolik had no explanation. According to them, however, the ancient people somehow knew where this outcrop was and thus dug through the sediment to expose it. They then sculpted it, covered it with sediment, placed the cow stone above it, covered the cow stone with more sediment, and finally arranged the megalithic architecture on the surface.
This seems quite implausible, and perhaps there is a simpler explanation: the bedrock sculpture long predates the Late Neolithic given by Wendorf.23 How old is the bedrock sculpture, who built it, and why was it built? What could have been its true meaning? Clearly it was important enough to be made the centerpiece of the Nabta Playa ceremonial complex when the Late Neolithic people placed the cow stone over it thousands of years later. Unfortunately we could not investigate this matter further, for the sediment has been dumped back into the hole, and, as we ha
ve learned, some of the surface megaliths have been removed and taken to the Nubian Museum in Aswan while others have been moved on site, scattered randomly (see appendix 3). Whatever might be the solution to the unsolved mystery that lies behind the multilayered and pangeneration construction of the CSA, it is sure to fit into a very elegant astronomical scheme.*29
We must also remember that Complex Structure A, although the largest at Nabta Playa, is but one of thirty complex structures in the southwest part of the site. Only two of these structures, CSA and another, CSB, were fully excavated. The bedrock under CSB was also sculpted, but into a different shape described as an inclined oval disc; there was no embedded sculpture above it. A third complex structure was also partially excavated, and two more complex structures had holes drilled into their sediment, confirming the presence of bedrock outcrops. This led Wendorf and his team to conclude that all the complex structures seen on top of the sediments probably contain a sculpted bedrock outcrop covered by 3 or 4 meters (10 or 13 feet) of sediment.
What could have driven the ancient people of Nabta Playa to sculpt all these outcrops of bedrock? Perhaps more intriguingly, when these outcrops were completely covered by sediment carried and compacted by wind and rainfall thousands of years later, how could they have been rediscovered by the people who built the megalith arrangements on the surface? Or, were they not rediscovered by the Late Neolithic people? Perhaps, instead, they were maintained over thousands of years by an even more ancient culture about which we know almost nothing.
Let us not forget, as well, the most provocative question that surrounds these mysterious complex structures. When the CPE, led by Wendorf, started excavations at Nabta Playa in the 1970s, they very much hoped that the many complex structures and tumuli were tombs that contained human remains of high-ranking individuals or even kings. Instead excavators found the strangely sculpted outcrops of rock and the skeletons of cows in the tumuli. If we bear in mind that the complex structures and the tumuli are an integral part of a vast ceremonial complex that is intensely astronomical and stellar, we may wonder if the empty tombs and cow-bone burials are part of some mysterious star ritual related to some ancestral cult of rebirth. This provocative thought occurs because, as we will see in chapter 6, the same empty tombs have baffled Egyptologists when the Old Kingdom pyramids were explored and found to contain no human remains. Even more intriguingly, in some of the great pyramids of Giza only the bones of cows were found. Further, like the ceremonial complex of Nabta Playa, these pyramid complexes were intensely stellar in their orientation and symbolism. In chapter 6 we will return to this strange link between the empty tombs of Nabta Playa and those empty pyramids of ancient Egypt. Meanwhile, let us examine another mysterious feature at Nabta Playa: the largest megalith, which Wendorf called Megalith X-1.
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