Sirius and Saturn
                                       
   by

Lynn E. Rose
                    ___________________________________

   Lynn F. Rose received both his BA in Ancient History and Classical
   Languages (majoring in Greek) and his MA in Philosophy from Ohio State
   University. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of
   Pennsylvania. He taught ancient philosophy for 35 years at the State
   University of New York at Buffalo, where he is now Emeritus Professor
   of Philosophy. He has published two books: Aristotle's Syllogistic
   (1969) and Sun, Moon, and Soth is: A Study of Calendars and Calendar
   Reforms in Ancient Egypt (1999). He is also the author of numerous
   articles on Greek philosophy. ancient calendars and archaeoastronomy.
                    ___________________________________

   Lynn Rose

  Summary
  
   A more careful reading of the Canopus Decree enables us to
   retrocalculate Sothic dates much more precisely than ever before.
   Middle Kingdom lunar documents fail to fit in the second millennium
   but they do fit in the 4th century, with the IIII prt 16 heliacal
   rising of Sirius in -394. My 'modified-Philolaos' model (1979) remains
   viable today: Earth once orbited Saturn, always keeping the same face
   toward Saturn, which thus appeared stationary. Other 'Saturn theories'
   sometimes suffer from 'northernism', from an overcrowding of
   divinities, from too much myth and from the lack of any descriptive
   name (how about 'god-kebob'?).

  Introduction
  
   This paper is in two separate parts and I do not pretend that they can
   be woven together into a seamless whole. The original plan was to
   include not only a discussion of the El-Lahun papyri - which feature a
   dated heliacal rising of Sirius in the context of a number of lunar
   dates - but also a discussion of the Ninsianna or Venus observations.
   That plan had to be revised, because of my eventual realisation that
   the Ninsianna observations do not show what I long thought. Those of
   you who have read my letter of retraction in C&CR 1998:2, p. 57, will
   realise that I no longer insist that the Ninsianna observations imply
   an eccentricity of about 0.1 for Earth's orbit. The Ninsianna data may
   still turn out to show that Earth was once on a different orbit but
   this will require some argument other than the one that I long
   favoured. The textual analyses [1] that Raymond C. Vaughan and I
   carried out remain solid but our orbital analysis of the Ninsianna
   observations is far from complete. That has been Vaughan's view all
   along; I was the one who jumped the gun with the 0.1eccentricity.

   Nonetheless, the Ninsianna observations are of critical importance,
   for both catastrophists and uniformitarians. The uniformitarians see
   retrocalculation of an early- or mid-second-millennium fit for the
   Ninsianna observations as settling the chronology of W. Asia during
   the entire second millennium. For catastrophists, a non-uniformitarian
   explanation of these observations, placing them in, say, the 9th or
   8th century, would show Velikovsky's scenario to be on the right
   track. However, any uniformitarian explanation for, say, the 9th or
   8th century or earlier would call into question Velikovsky's entire
   Mars scenario and any uniformitarian explanation for the middle of the
   second millennium or earlier would call into question his Venus
   scenario as well. The stakes are high and the need for a proper
   analysis of the Ninsianna observations remains a top priority.