Page 365 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

equinoxes. Moreover, it is known that the day of the heliacal rising of
52
Sirius—New Year’s Day in the Ancient Egyptian calendar—was
traditionally calculated at Heliopolis, where the Pyramid Texts were
compiled, and announced ahead of time to all the other major temples up
and down the Nile.
53
I remembered that Sirius was referred to directly in the Pyramid Texts
by ‘her name of the New Year’. Together with other relevant utterances
54
(e.g., 669 ), this confirmed that the Sothic calendar was at least as old as
55
the Texts themselves, and their origins stretched back into the mists of
56
distant antiquity. The great enigma, therefore, is this: in such an early
period, who could have possessed the necessary know-how to observe
and take note of the coincidence of the period of 365.25 days with the
heliacal rising of Sirius—a coincidence described by the French
mathematician R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz as ‘an entirely exceptional
celestial phenomenon’?
57
We cannot but admire the greatness of a science capable of discovering such a
coincidence. The double star of Sirius was chosen because it was the only star that
moves the needed distance and in the right direction against the background of
the other stars. This fact, known four thousand years before our time and
forgotten until our day, obviously demands an extraordinary and prolonged
observation of the sky.
58
It was such a legacy—built out of long centuries of precise observational
astronomy and scientific record-keeping—that Egypt seems to have I
benefited from at the beginning of the historical period and that was
expressed in the Pyramid Texts.
In this, too, there lies a mystery ...

Copies, or translations?

Writing in 1934, the year of his death, Wallis Budge, former Keeper of
Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum and the author of an
authoritative hieroglyphic dictionary, made this frank admission:
59

52 Ibid., p. 26-7. For numbers of stars visible to the naked eye see Ian Ridpath and Wil
Tirion, Collins Guide to Stars and Planets, London, 1984, p. 4.
Sacred Science, p. 173.
53
54 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 165, line 964. Sacred Science, p. 287.
55 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 165, 284; Sacred Science, in particular p.
287ff.
56 The established archaeological horizon of the calendar can indeed be pushed back
even further because of the recent discovery, in a First Dynasty tomb in upper Egypt, of
an inscription reading, ‘Sothis, herald of the New Year’ (reported in Death of Gods in
Ancient Egypt, p. 40.)
57 Sacred Science, p. 290.
Ibid., p. 27.
58
59 E. A. Wallis Budge, An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, (2 volumes), John Murray,
London, 1920.

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