Could this really be so? How could the Old Kingdom Egyptians, having taken the trouble to construct the huge Giza necropolis and the rest of the Memphite monuments, fail to make any mention of the Great Sphinx?
One possibility which deserves to be taken seriously is that they did not mention it because they did not build it—but rather inherited it from a far earlier epoch. Even on this scenario, however, it strains credulity to suppose, in all their prolific texts, carved on the walls of nine royal Pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, that they would not make a single reference to so magnificent a statue occupying so crucial a site.
The other possibility which has to be considered, therefore, is that Egyptologists could somehow have failed to recognize the name given to the Sphinx in the Pyramid Texts.
There is one very obvious contender.
As we have seen, the Sphinx in the New Kingdom was known not only as Hor-em-Akhet but also as Horakhti. And although the name Hor-em-Akhet definitely does not appear in the Pyramid Texts it is a simple fact that the name Horakhti does, many times over. Indeed these archaic scriptures contain hundreds of direct mentions of Horakhti, ‘Horus-of-the-Horizon’,[395] all of which refer, as scholars agree, ‘to the god rising in the east at dawn’.[396] What they have never suspected is the possibility that they may be confronted here by the ancient Egyptian dualistic way of referring to an earthly counterpart by means of its celestial twin.
Searching for Horakhti
‘The doors of the sky are thrown open for Horakhti,’ states one typical passage in the Pyramid Texts, ‘the doors of the sky are thrown open at dawn for Horus of the East ...’[397] Elsewhere, in line 928, we read: ‘go to ... Horakhti at the horizon ... I go up on this eastern side of the sky ...’[398]
Virtually unnoticed by Egyptologists, who write off all such utterances as ‘mystical mumbo-jumbo’, the Pyramid Texts also provide us with some extremely important astronomical clues when they tell us, again and again, that the dawn rising of Horakhti in the east coincides with the time and place ‘where the gods were born’. For example:
The Winding Waterway is flooded, the Fields of Rushes are filled, that I may be ferried over to the eastern side of the sky, to the place where the gods were born, and I was born there with them, as Horus, as the Horizon Dweller [Horakhti] ...[399]
... go to ... Horakhti at the horizon ... on the eastern side of the sky where the gods are born.[400]
... the birth of the gods before you [Horus] in the five epagomenal days ...[401]
Making use of the proper astronomical key, let us try to decode this alleged ‘mystical mumbo-jumbo’:
1. The ‘place where the gods [i.e. the stars] are born’ is a specific direction as to where we are to observe Horakhti: the eastern horizon—where all heavenly bodies rise.
2. The time of year at which we are to make our observations is also clearly specified: the so-called ‘five epagomenal days’, or five ‘days upon the year’. To understand this reference we need only remember that the ancient Egyptian calendar was based on 360 days plus five extra or intercalcary days which they called ‘the days upon the year’ (epagomenae in Greek). During these five days five Neters or gods were said to have been born, two of whom—Osiris and Isis—were identified by the ancient Egyptians with the constellation of Orion and the star Sirius (also called Sothis).
3. Last but not least the Pyramid Texts also specify the time of day at which the sky is to be observed—clearly dawn, since this was when the birth of the gods was said to have occurred:
Behold Osiris has come as Orion ... the dawn-light bears you with Orion ... your third is Sothis [Sirius] ...’[402]
Sothis [Sirius] is swallowed up [i.e. fades in the dawn] by the Duat, pure and living in the Horizon.[403]
The reed-floats of the sky are brought down to me ... that I may go up on them to Horakhti at the horizon. I go up on this eastern side of the sky where the gods are born, and I am born as Horus, as ‘Him of the Horizon’ ... Sothis is my [companion] ...[404]
The sky is clear [is lighting up], Sothis lives ...[405]
It is Sothis ... who prepares yearly sustenance for you in her name of ‘Year’ ...[406]
Geographical and cosmological context
The day on which Sothis-Sirius, after a period of invisibility, was first seen rising with the sun at dawn (i.e. the event referred to by astronomers as the ‘heliacal rising’ of this star) was taken by the ancient Egyptians as the cosmic marker for the beginning of their New Year.
Furthermore it is certain from the passages quoted above, and from many other references in the Pyramid Texts, that the dawn rising of Sothis-Sirius coincided with the rising of ‘Horakhti’. This is an important piece of astronomical information which helps us to identify who Horakhti is—or rather which celestial figure he represents.
We also know from historical records and from computer reconstructions that two major events—one celestial and the other terrestrial—coincided with the heliacal rising of Sirius during the Pyramid Age (circa 2500 bc). The celestial event was the summer solstice. And the terrestrial event, as the reader will recall from the previous chapter, was the start of the Nile’s annual flood—the ‘Great Inundation’ that brought fertility to the land.[407]
Once this geographical and cosmological context is fully taken into account we can see exactly what it is that the compilers of the Pyramid Texts were transposing from the ground to the sky when they tell us that the appearance of Horakhti at dawn coincided in their epoch with the start of the ‘great flood’:
The Winding Waterway is flooded, that I may be ferried thereon to the horizon, to Horakhti ... Re has taken me to himself, to the sky, to the eastern side of the sky, as this Horus, as the Dweller in the Duat, as this star which illumines the sky [which] is my sister Sothis ...[408]
This is Horus who came forth from the Nile ...[409]
They row Horus, they row Horus in the procession of Horus on the Great Flood. The doors of the sky are opened, the doors of the firmament are thrown open for Horus of the East at dawn ...[410]
Also passage 1172 speaks of ‘the Great Flood which is in the sky’ in the region of the Duat.
So, to summarize, far from being ‘mumbo-jumbo’, the Pyramid Texts go to great lengths to make it clear that during the epoch of their compilation, circa 2500 bc, the rising of Horakhti at dawn coincided with the summer solstice, and with the season of the inundation, at the moment when the Duat—the celestial Kingdom of Osiris-Orion—occupied the eastern portion of the sky. We can also deduce from the texts that Re, i.e. the sun’s disc, was seen somehow to merge or to unite—or ‘coalesce’—with Horakhti at the same time. This is made amply clear by the following reading: ‘Re has taken me to himself to the eastern side of the sky as this Horus, as the “Dweller in the Duat”.’[411]
In other words, what we need to look for in order to identify Horakhti with certainty is an astronomical conjunction during the summer solstice in the Pyramid Age when both the sun and some other significant celestial body would have been seen to occupy the same specific place on the eastern horizon.
As we shall see in the next chapter, computer simulations provide us with the means to search for such a conjunction. They also enable us to relive the drama of the Horus-Kings of ancient Egypt as they participated in an extraordinary ritual, physically re-enacting celestial events observed by the astronomer priests of Heliopolis on their eastern horizon and reflected in the artificial western ‘Horizon’ of Heliopolis, i.e. amongst the vast and eternal monuments of the Giza necropolis.
Chapter 10
The Quest of the Horus-King
‘Egypt ... considered life to be everlasting and denied the reality of death ... Pharaoh was not mortal but a god. This was the fundamental concept of Egyptian kingship, that Pharaoh was of divine essence, a god incarnated ... It is wrong to speak of the deification of Pharaoh. His divinity was not proclaimed at a certain moment in a manner comparable to the concretatio of the dead emperor
by the Roman senate. His coronation was not an apotheosis but an epiphany.’
Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, 1948
‘The figure of Osiris is not exclusively at home in mythology ... Each king, at death, becomes Osiris, just as each king, in life, appears “on the throne of Horus”; each king is Horus ... The question whether Osiris and Horus are ... gods or kings is, for the Egyptian, meaningless. These gods are the late king and his successor; these kings are those gods ...’
Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, 1948
The whole force, the impetus and the very raison d’être of the Pharaonic state was to provide all the required ceremonial settings that would enable the Horus-King to undertake a sort of supernatural quest—a journey back in time into the earthly and cosmic realms of his ‘father’ Osiris. Indeed this was the supreme quest in a Pharaoh’s lifetime and at its end lay the ultimate Holy Grail in the form of the astral body of Osiris which the king could encounter only after overcoming many dangers, difficulties and ordeals and after passing through many miracles and terrors. Once in the presence of Osiris the questor would beseech him to ‘rise again’ and bestow immortality not only on himself, but on the whole land of Egypt. This great ritual had to be performed by each successive Horus-King, (perhaps even each year) at a specific time preluding the ‘rising of Orion’.
Child of the Sun, son of Osiris
In his brilliant study on the Osirian cosmic myth,[412] the late professor of Egyptology at Manchester University, R. T. Rundle Clark, wrote that: ‘The king was the mediator between the community and the source of divine power, obtaining it through the ritual and regularizing it through his government. In Egypt there were two sources of power—in the sky and in the tomb with the ancestors. The first location made the king the child of the Sun God; the second location made him Horus, the son of Osiris ...’[413]
Let us reiterate this important dualistic quality of the Horus-King—’the child of the Sun God and the son of Osiris’—for in it lies the true mystery of the great Osirian and Horian rituals of the Pyramid Age. The potential powers of nature within the ‘dead’ Osiris remained ‘inert, asleep or listless, and completely passive’ until the Horus-King was able to undertake a ‘journey’ to the Duat and ‘visit his father’ and ‘open his mouth’, i.e. bring him back to life.[414] This final and supreme act of filial devotion would then release all the forces of nature which would in turn bring forth the flooding of the Nile and the growth of vegetation—the forces, in short, that would fertilize and regenerate Egypt. In Rundle Clark’s words: ‘Theologically, the result of Horus’s ministration is that Osiris can “send out his soul” or “set himself in motion” ... The time of Orion in the southern sky after the time of its invisibility is the sign for the beginning of a new season of growth, the revival of nature in all aspects. Osiris has been transformed into a “living soul” ...’[415]
Sir E. A. Wallis Budge also explains how, from its earliest beginnings, the Pharaonic state was entirely committed to provide the correct ceremonial setting for each successive Horus-King to be able to perform the ‘journey’ into the Duat to visit the twofold realm of Osiris in the ‘horizon’:
[The Egyptians] spared no pains in performing the works which they thought would help themselves and their dead to put on immortality and to arrive in the dominions of him who was ‘the King of eternity and the lord of everlastingness’. Every tradition which existed concerning the ceremonies that were performed on behalf of the dead Osiris by Horus and his ‘sons’ and ‘followers’, at some period which even so far back as the IVth Dynasty ... was extremely remote, was carefully preserved and faithfully imitated under succeeding dynasties ... The formulae which were declared to have been recited during the performance of such ceremonies were written down and copied for scores of generations ...’[416]
The whole emphasis on the King’s person, therefore, was that he was seen as the link between the two Duals, one in the sky and the other on land, both meant to contain the ‘Kingdom of Osiris’ as it was in the original ‘First Time’. The great ‘journeys’ of Horus thus took place both in the sky and on the ground and ran, as it were, in parallel. This is how the drama seems to have been conceived:
1. In the sky the Horus-King was the ‘son of the Sun’ and had to follow the path of the sun disc, cross the ‘cosmic river’ on the Solar-bark and reach the Gateway that lead into the sky-Duat of his ‘father Osiris’ in the eastern horizon.[417] He then had to travel on one of the ‘roads’ to Rostau, the centre of the Duat, where (then and now) are to be found the three stars of Orion’s belt.
2. On the ground the Horus-King was the bodily ‘son of Osiris’ and had to follow the earthly path, cross the Nile on the solar boat and reach the Gateway (the great Sphinx) that led into the earth-Duat of his ‘father Osiris’ in the western ‘horizon’, i.e. the necropolis of Giza. He then had to travel on one of the ‘roads’ to Rostau, the centre of the Duat, where (then and now) are to be found the three great Pyramids of Giza.
In both these ‘journeys’ the Horus-King somehow had to be able to pass through a sort of ‘time gateway’ which permitted him to enter the twofold Duat realms of Osiris—i.e. Rostau-Giza—as they were remembered from the mythical golden age of the gods:
[The council says to Horus]: Indeed this journey of yours ... is as when [the first] Horus went to his father Osiris so that he might be a spirit thereby, that he might be a soul thereby ...[418]
Indeed this journey of yours, indeed these journeys of yours [sky and land] are the journeys of [the first] Horus in search of his father Osiris ...[419]
From such references it is quite obvious that the events catalogued in the sky and on the land in the ‘twofold funeral regions of Osiris’ are somehow set or ‘frozen’ far back in the past in ‘the time of the gods’, the time of Osiris and Horus—i.e. Zep Tepi, the ‘First Time’.
Also obvious, as we have seen in previous chapters, is the way in which the twofold funeral regions of Osiris are said to reflect each other at the time of the heliacal rising of Sirius, the ‘star of Isis’, the sister-wife of Osiris and mother of Horus—an astronomical event which we know coincided in the early Pyramid Age with the appearance of the rising sun at the summer solstice (known as the ‘birth of Re’).[420] It was at this propitious moment that the Horus-King set out on his quest for the regeneration of Egypt by participating in a grand rebirth ritual simultaneously as the ‘son of Osiris’ and the ‘son of Re’.
As the ‘son of Osiris’ he emerged from ‘the womb of Isis’, i.e. the star Sirius,[421] at dawn on the summer solstice, i.e. the day of the ‘Birth of Re’. It was then—and there—both at the sky-horizon and on the earth ‘horizon’ that the Horus-King was meant to find himself in front of the Gateway to Rostau. Guarding that Gateway on the earth-horizon’ (i.e. at Giza) he would encounter the gigantic figure of a lion—the Great Sphinx. And guarding that Gateway in the sky-horizon his celestial counterpart would find ... what?
As usual, once we understand their profoundly astronomical nature, the Pyramid Texts provide us with all the necessary co-ordinates to answer this question. It is simply a matter of realizing that the ‘weird’ symbolic language used in the texts—far from being mumbo-jumbo—is in fact a precise scientific terminology dressed up in the liturgical clothing of a cosmic drama.[422]
Seventy days from Horakhti
It is well known, and not a matter of controversy even amongst Egyptologists,[423] that the whole emphasis of the ancient Egyptian rebirth cult was on the seventy days of ‘invisibility’ which Sirius, the star of Isis, endured each year. These seventy days were seen as a cosmic preparation for astral rebirth and, not surprisingly, they were matched to the period of embalming in the mummification rituals of the dead.[424] The culmination and crescendo of this seventy-day period came with the first dawn reappearance, or rising, of Sirius which, as the reader will recall, occurred at around the time of the summer solstice during the Pyramid Age. This was when the astron
omer-priests of Heliopolis observed what is technically known as the heliacal rising of Sirius in the east.[425]
Since it was believed that all the potential powers of nature needed to cause the ‘rebirth’ of the cosmic Horus-King were building up in the ‘womb’ of the goddess Isis during these crucial seventy days, we can suppose that the beginning of the period marked the beginning of the ‘journey’ of Horus into the ‘underworld’—when the Duat was locked, as it were, below the horizon and thus directly ‘underneath’ the Giza necropolis.
From this it follows that we are invited to find out where the Horus-King’s celestial counterpart—i.e. the disc of the sun—stood in the sky some seventy days prior to the heliacal rising of Sirius. The Pyramid Texts again give us the clue. They specify that at this time the Horus-solar-King was to be found on the banks of the Milky Way just about to board the solar bark.[426] Remembering that the astronomical observations in the texts were made during the middle of the third millennium bc, let us try to decode this imagery using computer simulations.