Read Online The Egypt Code by Robert Bauval - Free Book Online

the circuit of the seasons is made to return with uniformity.
     
     
     
    For a man like Herodotus, a Greek, to say that it was not the Greeks but the Egyptians who first portioned the course of the sun in the year into twelve parts by using their knowledge of the stars is practically the same as saying that they created the zodiac. For this is precisely what the zodiac is: the portioning of the sun’s annual path into twelve parts . Further, confirmation is also given by Herodotus when he writes that it was the Egyptian priests who ‘first brought into use the names of the twelve gods, which the Greeks adopted from them’. Yet in spite of such affirmation by the ‘father of history’, there are Egyptologists such as Wallis Budge who admonish that ‘it is wrong, however, to conclude from this, as some have done, that the Egyptians were the inventors of the Zodiac, for they borrowed their knowledge of the Signs of the Zodiac, together with much else, from the Greeks’. 43 Why it is ‘wrong’ to do so, Wallis Budge does not explain; he seems simply to rest his case on the academic bias that favours Greek superiority in such matters. And so, most unfairly in my view, the honour for the invention of the zodiac, ‘together with much else’, he hands to the Greeks in one sweeping phrase. To be more specific, academics such as Wallis Budge claim that the Greek scholar Eudoxus of Cnidus, called ‘the founder of scientific astronomy’, was the first to identify the twelve gods with the twelve signs of the zodiac. Eudoxus probably borrowed his idea from earlier sources, although Babylonian sources rather than Egyptian are often cited by modern academics. Eudoxus, however, though he never visited Babylon, did, on the other hand, visit Egypt. Indeed he spent two years at Heliopolis during the reign of the pharaoh Nectanebo I, and was taught about the movement of the stars by the priests there. As Goyon pointed out:
    In Greece, astronomy before Eudoxus was a science that was presented in metaphysical terms. The sky was not observed seriously. Eudoxus is said to be the first to have employed direct observations. But as we have seen, he had used the Egyptian observatory at Kerkasore. He made discoveries in geometry and astronomy which indicated a very advanced level of science. So advanced even, that it is impossible to think that he drew it all from within himself. Only observations and continuous recording (of the sky) during many centuries could have given them to him. 44
     
     
     
    To be fair, Egyptologists do not deny that the ancient Egyptians carefully observed and recorded the movement of the stars and probably portioned the solar year into twelve parts or ‘months’ even as early as the third millennium BC. 45 But in the same breath they do deny that the Egyptians were capable of recognising in these portions or constellations the figures of the creatures in the way the Greeks or Babylonians did. This stands in total contradiction, however, not only of the accounts of Herodotus and others, but also of contemporary archaeological evidence. For there exist drawings of ancient Egyptian cosmology showing human as well as animal figures that quite clearly represent constellations, such as Orion as Osiris, Canis Major as Isis, the Plough as a bull’s thigh, Draco as a pregnant hippopotamus, and so on. Egyptologists will be quick to point out that these constellations are not zodiacal ones, i.e. they are not the twelve through which the sun passes in the course of the year. True. But also shown in the astronomical drawings from the ceilings of royal tombs dating from the Ramesside period are animal figures that are clearly zodiacal, such as a scorpion, a lion and a ram. And there is, of course, the cosmic scales which Maat personifies. Such clear evidence has on occasion brought protestation by more open-minded historians of science, such as the eminent Russian astronomer Alexander Gurshtein, for whom it was obvious that