/Sun, Moon, and Sothis: A Study of Calendars and Calendar Reforms in
  Ancient Egypt/ by Lynn E. Rose

(Kronos Press: Deerfield Beach, Florida 1999)

Reviewed by


    Frederic Jueneman

This book isn't for everyone, as it heavily concentrates on the minutiae
of calendrical detail that perhaps only a mathematician or historical
specialist in such matters could fully appreciate or even conditionally
respect. It is, without doubt, a superbly scholarly book. But what a hoot!

I don't believe that I've ever read a book quite like this one, only
half understanding what the author has to offer, but nevertheless
thoroughly enjoying the manner in which it is being said. As it is, Lynn
Rose, professor emeritus of philosophy at SUNY Buffalo, goes to great
pains to make his points absolutely and unequivocally clear, often
reiterating the particulars for emphasis -- without that nagging feeling
of redundancy many other authors who tend to repeat themselves give the
readership.

We are given a description of the 365-day calendar of the ancient
Egyptians, and how it relates to the Julian calendar of Imperial Rome
and the Alexandrian calendar of Roman-occupied Egypt, as well as to the
later 16th century Gregorian calendar reform.

Merely mentioned in passing by Rose -- and for the benefit of this
reviewer's readership -- is the name of Joseph Justus Scaliger
(1540-1609), whose own calendar reform was published in 1583, one year
after the amendment instituted by Pope Gregory XIII. Scaliger's formula,
using days instead of years, is called the Julian Day Count -- a
practice still used by astronomers today -- and named after his father,
Julius Caesar Scaliger, and should not be confused with the Julian
reform instituted in the first century bce. Scaliger's day count began
as of January 1, 4113 bce, a date that ostensibly would precisely
correspond with those of the ancient Roman tax calendar and the lunar
calendar. (By his calculation, this event would not occur again until
3868 ad.) However, Rose disputes this dating as it falls far outside
what he terms the Velikovsky Divide, that of the eventful year 687 bce,
when planetary disturbances rendered all previous calendars obsolete.

What a difference a quarter of a day makes! Holidays would tend to
wander ahead about one day every four years and, even if a pharaoh
enjoyed a long reign for some thirty years, such holidays would be off
by more than a week. Notwithstanding, the priestly order of Egypt stuck
to their guns and retained their 365-day year, knowing full well that
the 365^1 /_4 -day year and the religious year wouldn't be in alignment
again for almost a millennium and a half -- 1460 years: the Sothic
period. (This term is the Greek transliteration of the Egyptian
/Sopdet/, or /spdt/, ostensibly relating to the Star of Isis, Sirius.)

To forestall any misalignments, the holidays -- or "feasts" as they seem
to have been called -- were often regulated by the Moon, usually dating
the first of each month by noting the first /invisibility/ of the old
crescent just before sunrise. Since the monthly excursion of the Moon
takes about 29^1 /_2 days, the months varied between 29 and 30 days.

The ancient Babylonians knew that 235 synodical months (29.530589 days)
would equal 19 standard years of 365^1 /_4 days -- veritably within two
hours precision of the actual event. The Egyptian 365-day calendar would
be commensurate with 309 synodical months, or 25 years, with but an hour
difference over that time span. Rose goes to great lengths to explain
the significance of this 25-year cycle.

Of course, not all of the Egyptian holidays were regulated by the Moon.
Many were governed by the 365-day calendar itself, by the appearance of
Sirius in midsummer, or even other considerations such as the emergence
of Venus, the rising of the Nile, the encroaching harvest season, or
mayhaps even by the frivolous pleasure of the pharaoh.

An anchor was really needed to secure an initial starting point, and
this was the heliacal rising of Sirius, the Dog-Star, in midsummer. If
they happened to miss it on the expected morning of first visibility
because of smog or other poor seeing conditions, ah well, tomorrow
morning would work out just fine and things would balance out with next
year's viewing anyway. There was a certain, and perhaps excessive,
cavalier attitude with the secular scribes, although the ecclesiasts who
took their tasks seriously were much more rigorous and exacting.

It is well that these prelates were so meticulous, as they left records
of at least a few dozen of their "feast days" that can be determined
with some precision and assigned to definite lunar dates. And, it is
with these dates in the papyri of the 12th Dynasty of Egypt in the
Middle Kingdom that contemporary Egyptologists have had a field day
comparing notes, arguing trivia, and ultimately establishing this regnal
dynasty in the late 19th and early 18th century bce.

None were apparently completely happy with this arrangement but, if
consensus found it workable, it wasn't prudent to mess with success,
such as it was. According to the lament of Egyptologist Alan H. Gardiner:

    "To abandon 1786 bc as the year when Dynasty XII ended would be to
    cast adrift from our only firm anchor, a course that would have
    serious consequences for the history, not of Egypt alone, but of the
    entire Middle East."^[1] <#_ftn1>

And yet, the heliacal rising of Sirius that occurred on or about a
certain specific date every year would actually move forward one day
every four years with the 365-day calendar of the Egyptian clerics, so
that by the time of the post-Alexandrian Ptolemies it was deemed so
badly in need of reform that, once and for all, the ecclesiastic year
was decreed to finally conform with the civil year. So it was that the
Canopus Decree was issued in the days of Ptolemy III Euergetes (238 bce)
to correct this discrepancy. But who was paying attention? Certainly not
the priests who took sacred vows to preserve the hoary /status quo/ and
maintain control of the Sothic year.

And so it came to pass that the modern priesthood -- the
historiographers and Egyptologists -- took the baton from their ancient
forebears and made the 1460-year Sothic period a bulwark of dynastic
Egypt and, along with it, the lengthy consecutive succession of
Manethonian pharaohs. (It is to be remembered that the standard
chronology is heavily based on the king-lists of Egyptian cleric
Manetho, whose enthusiastic provincialism spun out such a capricious
line of royalty, much as Berossos did for the even more fantastic
Babylonian king-lists, but with only slightly more discretion than
Berossos' extraordinary flights of royal profusion with reigns extending
into thousands of years.)

At any rate, the Sothic period has become the meter-stick /par
excellence/ for our contemporary historians to measure Egyptian regnal
history into the dim and distant past, and the more times it was applied
the more ancient the civilizations became, until ultimately we encounter
an eldritch prehistory with no chronicles of any prior existence.

We find a concatenation of oddities. We find too many anomalies in art
and architecture, such as the 26th Dynasty of the New Kingdom seemingly
continuing or emulating styles from the 12th Dynasty of the Middle
Kingdom. We find too many ephemeral dynasties, haunting the king-lists
with transitory pharaohs that seem to waft through time without kingdom
and provenance. And, if that weren't enough, we find even less
correlation with the astronomical records kept by the priestly class.

It's little wonder that Gardiner wept.

Then, several years ago, Rose took the unprecedented, unconscionable,
and even unthinkable step of having the Middle Kingdom leap-frog over
the New Kingdom right down to the time of Alexander the Great, a hurdle
of one entire Sothic period -- over 1400 years -- leaving the Old
Kingdom free to move forward in time to fill the chronological vacuum.
Ordinarily, this would be an act of sheer lunacy. At worst, unbridled
heresy.

But it was here, in the late 5th and early 4th century bce, that
astronomical correlation pay-dirt was found aplenty with respect to the
"anchoring" Twelfth Dynasty. It was one of those exquisite strokes of
genius that rarely come in any given lifetime.

Despite his daring hypotheses as presented in his /Ages in Chaos/
series, Immanuel Velikovsky was content to leave much of Egyptian
chronology intact, except to move events forward by six to as much as
eight centuries and rearrange several key dynasties. Velikovsky was
vilified for his now-modest appearing reconstructions. As of today, Rose
has raided the game and showed the world that "received wisdom" with
respect to Egyptian chronology is a fraudulent, mendacious -- even
bemusing -- shambles.

In one "swell foop," the unexplained and otherwise anachronistic
artistic and architectural replication of Middle and New Kingdom works
of art and crafts have credible provenance. No longer is there a
question of why the 26th Dynasty avataristically continued the arts of
the 12th Dynasty after a hiatus of a millennium and a half -- not when
the 12th actually follows the 26th by some 40-odd years!

Moreover, we might also find evanescent monarchies merging or vanishing
altogether. Something Velikovsky himself devoutly would have wished to
have seen happen -- but this yet remains to be proven.

However, as of this moment in time, a new and comprehensive nomenclature
has become eminently crucial in re-establishing a coherent and credible
chronology, not only of Egypt but of the entire Middle East. And Rose
has postulated some rational guidelines toward that end.

To finally address Gardiner's lamentation over that little matter of the
Middle East, we find enlightened folks like Hammurabi the Lawgiver less
of a perspicacious First Dynasty Babylonian and more of a circumspect
monarch of the later Persian Empire, with Rose graciously giving both
credit and credence to the stratigraphic chronology reconstructed by
Gunnar Heinsohn. In fact, we now see Hammurabi decked out in the
vêtements and accoutrements of /Darius the Great/. This, in and of
itself, should create quite a stir among the cognoscenti!^[2] <#_ftn2>

Three-quarters of /Sun, Moon, and Sothis/ are spent in meticulously
laying out the intricate groundwork in astronomical dating techniques.
It is a laborious and thankless effort, which even the more determined
reader -- including this reviewer -- may have some grave difficulty in
following, what with the many unfamiliar expressions and lines of
reasoning commonly used by historiographers to force-fit the kings and
monarchs and pharaohs into a Procrustean mold. Even Gardiner himself was
moved to state: "What is proudly advertised as Egyptian history is
merely a collection of rags and tatters."^[3] <#_ftn3> Indeed.

But Rose is extremely methodical in explaining these intricacies. And,
at the final denouement, at long last -- and not unexpectedly -- he lays
out his pat hand and says: "Rummy!"

Aldous Huxley once said that facts don't cease to exist because they are
ignored. Perhaps now we have a work that's far too important to merely
disregard, as has been past practice for unpopular hypotheses. The
chroniclers themselves cannot afford that luxury, for this appears to be
a Copernican revolution in modern historiography. Moreover, one can
hardly ignore the flushing down the tubes of 150 years of intensely
protracted scholarship in Egyptian chronology, however misinterpreted.
This holds the promise of becoming a rather noisy purge.

Rose is to be highly commended for his cautious effort and unflappable
patience over the past 30 years.


      Notes

^[1] <#_ftnref1> A.H. Gardiner, /Egypt of the Pharaohs/ (Oxford, 1961),
p. 148

^[2] <#_ftnref2> (But see D. Cardona, "The Two Sargons and Their
Successors," Part II, /AEON/ I:6 (December 1988), pp. 90-95; E.
Cochrane, "Heinsohn's Ancient 'History'," /AEON/ V:4 (July 1999), pp. 61
ff. *Ed.*)

^[3] <#_ftnref3> A. H. Gardiner, /op. cit./, p. 53