On the Orientation of Ancient Egyptian Temples: (5) Testing the Theory in Middle Egypt and Sudan

Abstract

In a series of papers published in this journal in recent years, some of the authors, members of the Egyptian-Spanish Mission for the Archaeoastronomy of Ancient Egypt, have made a number of interesting discoveries relating to the way in which the ancient Egyptians might have orientated their sacred buildings. In Paper 4, the last of the papers and an overview, a simple theory was postulated, according to which a series of facts were established that clearly connect temple orientation to the local landscape, landscape being understood to include both the earth and the sky. Hence simple astronomical patterns or families were basically defined in relation to the stations of the sun (solstitial, equinoctial or seasonal, notably New Year’s Eve or Wepet Renpet), the brightest stars of the Egyptian skies (notably Sirius, ancient Egyptian Sopdet) and the cardinal directions. On several occasions, these patterns were in agreement with local topographic landmarks such as the course of the Nile. We considered our sample of 330 alignments to be statistically representative beyond doubt, and we were convinced that new data would serve only to reinforce (or slightly modify) our results. The moment has now arrived to attempt to falsify this statement. Two experiments have been selected with this purpose. On the one hand, a new campaign, the sixth, was conducted in Egypt in December 2008 at the few temples of Middle Egypt and the Oasis of Fayum (see Figure 1) that for various reasons could not be measured in previous campaigns. The idea was to complete the sample of Egyptian temples almost to exhaustion. On the other hand, a completely new experiment was designed using temples in Sudan. Data were obtained from high-resolution images of Google Earth, covering a vast area of the country (but not all of it), and, in those sectors where high-resolution images were not available, from good quality maps derived from the specialist literature. The idea in this case was to carry out a significant test of our theories with a completely independent set of temples — independent not only from the geographical point of view, but also because most of them belong to an independent culture, the Kingdom of Kush, although this was admittedly heavily influenced by Egyptian schemes and traditions. As in previous reports, we wish to stress clearly that we are not seeking alignments of extreme precision, but we aim rather to obtain a statistically significant sample of monuments where we can perform our archaeoastronomical analysis. Bearing this is mind, we made our own fieldwork measurements using a high precision compass JHA, xli (2010)