Page 364 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

measurer of the earth’) was specifically empowered to grant a life of
millions of years to the deceased pharaoh. Osiris, ‘king of eternity, lord
45
of everlasting’, was described as traversing millions of years in his life.’
46
And figures like ‘tens of millions of years’ (as well as the more mind-
boggling ‘one million of millions of years’) occurred often enough to
47
suggest that some elements at least of Ancient Egyptian culture must
have evolved for the convenience of scientifically minded people with
more than passing insight into the immensity of time.
Such a people would, of course, have required an excellent calendar—
one that would have facilitated complex and accurate calculations. It was
therefore not surprising to learn that the Ancient Egyptians, like the
Maya, had possessed such a calendar and that their understanding of its
workings seemed to have declined, rather than improved, as the ages
went by. It was tempting to see this as the gradual erosion of a corpus
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of knowledge inherited an extremely long time ago, an impression
supported by the Ancient Egyptians themselves, who made no secret of
their belief that their calendar was a legacy which they had received ‘from
the gods’.
We consider the possible identity of these gods in more detail in the
following chapters. Whoever they were, they must have spent a great deal
of their time observing the stars, and they had accumulated a fund of
advanced and specialized knowledge concerning the star Sirius in
particular. Further evidence for this came in the form of the most useful
calendrical gift which the gods supposedly gave to the Egyptians: the
Sothic (or Sirian) cycle.
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The Sothic cycle was based on what is referred to in technical jargon as
‘the periodic return of the heliacal rising of Sirius’, which is the first
appearance of this star after a seasonal absence, rising at dawn just
ahead of the sun in the eastern portion of the sky. In the case of Sirius
50
the interval between one such rising and the next amounts to exactly
365.25 days—a mathematically harmonious figure, uncomplicated by
further decimal points, which is just twelve minutes longer than the
duration of the solar year.
51
The curious thing about Sirius is that out of an estimated 2000 stars in
the heavens visible to the naked eye it is the only one to rise heliacally at
this precise and nicely rounded interval of 365 and a quarter days—a
unique product of its ‘proper motion’ (the speed of its own movement
through space) combined with the effects of precession of the

45 Ibid., p. cxviii. See also The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 400.
46 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. 8.
47 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 248.
48 For a full discussion see Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, particularly pp. 328-30.
Sacred Science, p. 27.
49
50 Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 27.
51 Sacred Science, p. 172.

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