Page 362 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

In one, for example, Ra, the Sun God, was depicted as seated upon an
iron throne encircled by lesser gods who moved around him constantly
and who were said to be ‘in his train’. Likewise, in another passage, the
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deceased Pharaoh was urged to ‘stand at the head of the two halves of
the sky and weigh the words of the gods, the aged ones, who revolve
around Ra.’
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If the ‘aged ones’ and the ‘encircling gods’ revolving around Ra should
prove to be parts of a terminology referring to the planets of our solar
system, the original authors of the Pyramid Texts must have enjoyed
access to some remarkably advanced astronomical data. They must have
known that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun rather than
vice versa. The problem this raises is that neither the Ancient Egyptians
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at any stage in their history, nor even their successors the Greeks, or for
that matter the Europeans until the Renaissance, are supposed to have
possessed cosmological data of anything approaching this quality. How,
therefore, can its presence be explained in compositions which date back
to the dawn of Egyptian civilization?
Another (and perhaps related) mystery concerns the star Sirius, which
the Egyptians identified with Isis, the sister and consort of Osiris and the
mother of Horus. In a passage addressed to Osiris himself, the Pyramid
Texts state:

Thy sister Isis cometh unto thee rejoicing in her love for thee. Thou settest her
upon thee, thy issue entereth into her, and she becometh great with child like the
star Sept [Sirius, the Dog Star]. Horus-Sept cometh forth from thee in the form of
Horus, dweller in Sept.
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Many interpretations of this passage are, of course, possible. What
intrigued me, however, was the clear implication that Sirius was to be
regarded as a dual entity in some way comparable to a woman ‘great with
child’. Moreover, after the birth (or coming forth) of that child, the text
makes a special point of reminding us that Horus remained a ‘dweller in
Sept’, presumably suggesting that he stayed close to his mother.
Sirius is an unusual star. A sparkling point of light particularly
prominent in the winter months in the night skies of the northern
hemisphere, it consists of a binary star system, i.e. it is in fact, as the
Pyramid Texts suggest, a ‘dual entity’. The major component, Sirius-A, is
what we see. Sirius-B, on the other hand—the dwarf-star which revolves
around Sirius A—is absolutely invisible to the naked eye. Its existence did
not become known to Western science until 1862, when US astronomer
Alvin Clark spotted it through one of the largest and most advanced
telescopes of the day. How could the scribes who wrote the Pyramid
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35 Pyramid Texts cited in The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 158.
36 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 146.
Sacred Science, pp. 22-5, 29.
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38 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 93.
39 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 10:845.

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