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The story of the calendar is one of ingenuity, of a sophisticated combination of astronomy and mathematics. It is also a tale of conflict, religious fervor, and struggles for supremacy. The notion that the calendar was devised by and for farmers so that they would know when to sow and when to reap has been taken for granted too long; it fails both the test of logic and of fact.
Farmers do not need a formal calendar to know the seasons, and primitive societies have managed to feed themselves for generations without a calendar. The historic fact is that the calendar was devised in order to predetermine the precise time of festivals honoring the Gods. The calendar, in other words, was a religious device.
The first names by which months were called in Sumer had the prefix EZEN. The word did not mean "month"; it meant "festival." The months were the times when the Festival of Enlil, or the Festival of Ninurta, or those of the other leading deities were to be observed. That the calendar's purpose was to enable religious observances should not surprise one at all. We find an instance that still regulates our lives in the current common, but actually Christian calendar. Its principal festival and the focal point that determines the rest of the annual calendar is Easter, the celebration of the resurrection, according to the New Testament, of Jesus on the third day after his crucifixion.
Western Christians celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs on or right after the spring equinox. This created a problem for the early Christians in Rome, where the dominant calendrical element was the solar year of 365 days and the months were of irregular length and not exactly related to the Moon's phases. The determination of Easter Day therefore required a reliance on the Jewish calendar, be-cause the Last Supper, from which the other crucial days of Eastertide are counted, was actually the Seder meal with which the Jewish celebration of Passover begins on the eve of the fourteenth day of the month Nissan, the time of the full Moon.
As a result, during the first centuries of Christianity Easter was celebrated in accordance with the Jewish calendar. It was only when the Roman emperor Constantine, having adopted Christianity, convened a church council, the Council of Nicaea, in the year 325, that the continued dependence on the Jewish calendar was severed, and Christianity, until then deemed by the gentiles as merely another Jewish sect, was made into a separate religion. In this change, as in its origin, the Christian calendar was thus an expression of religious beliefs and an instrument for determining the dates of worship.
It was also so later on, when the Moslems burst out of Arabia to conquer by the sword lands and people east and west; the imposition of their purely lunar calendar was one of their first acts, for it had a profound religious connotation: it counted the passage of time from the Hegira, the migration of Islam's founder Mohammed from Mecca to Medina (in 622). The history of the Roman-Christian calendar, interesting by itself, illustrates some of the problems inherent in the imperfect meshing of solar and lunar times and the resulting need, over the millennia, for calendar reforms and the ensuing notions of ever-renewing Ages.
The current Common Era Christian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 and is therefore called the Gregorian Calendar. It constituted a reform of the previous Julian Calendar, so named after the Roman emperor Julius Caesar. That noted Roman emperor, tired of the chaotic Roman calendar, invited in the first century BC. the astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria, Egypt, to suggest a reform of the calendar. Sosigenes's advice was to forget about lunar time keeping and to adopt a solar calendar "as that of the Egyptians."
The result was a year of 365 days plus a leap year of 366 days once in four years. But that still failed to account for the extra 11 1/4 minutes a year in excess of the quarter-day over and above the 365 days. That seemed too minute to bother with; but the result was that by 1582 the first day of spring, fixed by the Council of Nicaea to fall on March 21, was retarded by ten days to March 11th. Pope Gregory corrected the shortfall by simply decreeing on October 4, 1582, that the next day should be October 15.
This reform established the currently used Gregorian calendar, whose other innovation was to decree that the year begin on January first. The astronomer's suggestion that a calendar "as that of the Egyptians" be adopted in Rome was accepted, one must assume, without undue difficulty because by then Rome, and especially Julius Caesar, were quite familiar with Egypt, its religious customs, and hence with its calendar. The Egyptian calendar was at that time indeed a purely solar calendar of 365 days divided into twelve months of thirty days each. To these 360 days an end-of-year religious festival of five days was added, dedicated to the Gods Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis, and Nephthys.
The Egyptians were aware that the solar year is somewhat longer than 365 days - not just by the full day every four years, as Julius Caesar had allowed for, but by enough to shift the calendar back by one month every 120 years and by a full year every 1,460 years. The determining or sacred cycle of the Egyptian calendar was this 1,460-year period, for it coincided with the cycle of the heliacal rising of the star Sirius (Egyptian Sept, Greek Sothis) at the time of the Nile's annual flooding, which in turn takes place at about the summer solstice (in the northern hemisphere).
Edward Meyer (Agyptische Chronologic) concluded that when this Egyptian calendar was introduced, such a convergence of the heliacal rising of Sirius and of the Nile's inundation had occurred on July 19th. Based on that Kurt Sethe (Urgeschichte und dlteste Religion der Agypter) calculated that this could have happened in either 4240 BC. or 2780 BC. by observing the skies at either Heliopolis or Memphis.
By now researchers of the ancient Egyptian calendar agree that the solar calendar of 360 + 5 days was not the first prehistoric calendar of that land. This "civil" or secular calendar was introduced only after the start of dynastic rule in Egypt, i.e., after 3100 BC.; according to Richard A. Parker (The Calendars of the Ancient Egyptians) it took place circa 2800 BC. "probably for administrative and fiscal purposes."
This civil calendar supplanted, or perhaps supplemented at first, the "sacred" calendar of old. In the words of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "the ancient Egyptians originally employed a calendar based upon the Moon." According to R.A. Parker (Ancient Egyptian Astronomy) that earlier calendar was, "like that of all ancient peoples," a calendar of twelve lunar months plus a thirteenth intercalary month that kept the seasons in place.
That earlier calendar was also, in the opinion of Lockyer, equinoctial and linked indeed to the earliest temple at Heliopolis, whose orientation was equinoctial. In all that, as in the association of months with religious festivals, the earliest Egyptian calendar was akin to that of the Sumerians. The conclusion that the Egyptian calendar had its roots in predynastic times, before civilization appeared in Egypt, can only mean that it was not the Egyptians themselves who invented their calendar.
It is a conclusion that matches that regarding the zodiac in Egypt, and regarding both the zodiac and the calendar in Sumer: they were all the artful inventions of the "Gods." In Egypt, religion and worship of the Gods began in Heliopolis, close by the Giza pyramids; its original Egyptian name was Annu (as the name of the ruler of Nibiru) and it is called On in the Bible: when Joseph was made viceroy over all of Egypt (Genesis chapter 41), the Pharaoh "gave him Assenath, the daughter of Potiphera, the [high] priest of On, for a wife."
Its oldest shrine was dedicated to Ptah ("The Developer") who, according to Egyptian tradition, raised Egypt from under the waters of the Great Flood and made it habitable by extensive drainage and earthworks. Divine reign over Egypt was then transferred by Ptah to his son Ra ("The Bright One") who was also called Tern ("The Pure One"); and in a special shrine, also at Heliopolis, the Boat of Heaven of Ra, the conical Ben-Ben, could be seen by pilgrims once a year. Ra was the head of the first divine dynasty according to the Egyptian priest Manetho (his hieroglyphic name meant "Gift of Thoth"), who compiled in the third century BC. Egypt's dynastic lists.
The reign of Ra and his successors, the Gods Shu, Geb, Osiris, Seth, and Horus, lasted more than three millennia. It was followed by a second divine dynasty that was begun by Thoth, another son of Ptah; it lasted half as long as the first divine dynasty.
Thereafter a dynasty of demigods, thirty of them, reigned over Egypt for 3,650 years. Altogether, according to Manetho, the divine reigns of Ptah, the Ra dynasty, the Thoth dynasty, and the dynasty of the demigods lasted 17,520 years. Karl R. Lepsius (Konigsbuch der alten Agypter) noted that this time span represented exactly twelve Sothic cycles of 1,460 years each, thereby corroborating the prehistoric origin of calendrical-astronomical knowledge in Egypt.
Based on substantial evidence, we have concluded in The Wars of Gods and Men and other volumes of The Earth Chronicles that Ptah was none other than Enki and that Ra was Marduk of the Mesopotamian pantheon. It was to Enki and his descendants that the African lands were granted when Earth was divided among the Anunnaki after the Deluge, leaving the E.DIN (the biblical land of Eden) and the Mesopotamian sphere of influence in the hands of Enlil and his descendants.
Thoth, a brother of Ra/Marduk, was the God the Sumerians called Ningishzidda. Much of the history and violent conflicts that followed the Earth's division stemmed from the refusal of Ra/Marduk to acquiesce in the division. He was convinced that his father was unjustly deprived of lordship of Earth (what the epithet-name EN.KI, "Lord Earth," connoted); and that therefore he, not Enlil's Foremost Son Ninurta, should rule supreme on Earth from Babylon, the Mesopotamian city whose name meant "Gateway of the Gods."
Obsessed by this ambition, Ra/Marduk caused not only conflicts with the Enlilites, but also aroused the animosity of some of his own brothers by involving them in these bitter conflicts as well as by leaving Egypt and then returning to reclaim the lordship over it. In the course of these comings and goings and ups and downs in Ra/Marduk's struggles, he caused the death of a younger brother called Dumuzi, let his brother Thoth reign and then forced him into exile, and made his brother Nergal change sides in a War of the Gods that resulted in a nuclear holocaust.
It was in particular the on-again, off-again relationship with Thoth, we believe, that is essential to the Calendar Tales. The Egyptians, it will be recalled, had not one but two calendars. The first, with roots in prehistoric times, was "based upon the Moon." The later one, introduced several centuries after the start of pharaonic rule, was based on the 365 days of the solar year. Contrary to the notion that the latter "civil calendar" was an administrative innovation of a pharaoh, we suggest that it too, like the earlier one. was an artful creation of the Gods; except that while the first one was the handiwork of Thoth, the second one was the craft-work of Ra.
One aspect of the civil calendar considered specific and original to it was the division of the thirty-day months into "decans," ten-day periods each heralded by the heliacal rising of a certain star. Each star (depicted as a celestial God sailing the skies, Fig. 100) was deemed to give notice of the last hour of the night; and at the end of ten days, a new decan-star would be observed. It is our suggestion that the introduction of this decan-based calendar was a deliberate act by Ra in a developing conflict with his brother Thoth.
Figure 100
Both were sons of Enki, the great scientist of the Anunnaki, and one can safely assume that much of their knowledge had been acquired from their father. This is certain in the case of Ra/Marduk, for a Mesopotamian text has been found that clearly states so. It is a text whose beginning records a complaint by Marduk to his father that he lacks certain healing knowledge.
Enki's response is rendered thus:
Was there, perhaps, some jealousy between the two brothers on this score? The knowledge of mathematics, of astronomy, of orienting sacred structures was shared by both; witness to Marduk's attainments in these sciences was the magnificent ziggurat of Babylon (see Fig. 33) which, according to the Enuma elish, Marduk himself had designed.
But, as the above-quoted text relates, when it came to medicine and healing, his knowledge fell short of his brother's: he could not revive the dead, while Thoth could. We learn of the latter's powers from both Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources. His Sumerian depictions show him with the emblem of the entwined serpents (Fig. 101a), the emblem originally of his father Enki as the God who could engage in genetic engineering - the emblem, we have suggested, of the double helix of DNA (Fig. 101b).
Figures 101a and 101b
His Sumerian name, NIN.GISH.ZID.DA, which meant "Lord of the Artifact of Life," bespoke recognition of his capacity to restore life by reviving the dead. "Lord healer, Lord who seizes the hand, Lord of the Artifact of Life" a Sumerian liturgical text called him. He was prominently featured in magical healing and exorcism texts; a Maqlu ("Burnt Offerings") series of incantations and magical formulas devoted a whole tablet, the seventh, to him.
In one incantation, devoted to drowned mariners ("the seafaring folk who are utterly at rest"), the priest invokes the formulas of "Siris and Ningishzidda, the miracle workers, the spellbinders." Siris is the name of a Goddess otherwise unknown in the Sumerian pantheon, and the possibility that it is a Mesopotamian rendition of the star's name Sirius comes to our mind because in the Egyptian pantheon Sirius was the star associated with the Goddess Isis.
In Egyptian legendary tales, Thoth was the one who had helped Isis, the wife of Osiris, to extract from the dismembered Osiris the semen with which Isis was impregnated to conceive and bear Horus. This was not all. In an Egyptian inscription on an artifact known as the Metternich Stela, the Goddess Isis describes how Thoth brought her son Horus back from the dead after Horus was stung by a poisonous scorpion.
Responding to her cries, Thoth came down from the skies, "and he was provided with magical powers, and possessed the great power which made the word become indeed." And he per-formed magic, and by nighttime it drove the poison away and Horus was returned to life. The Egyptians held that the whole Book of the Dead, verses from which were inscribed on the walls of pharaonic tombs so that the deceased pharaoh could be translated into an Afterlife, was a composition of Thoth, "written with his own fingers."
In a shorter work called by the Egyptians the Book of Breathings, it was stated that.
We know from Sumerian sources that this knowledge, so essential in pharaonic beliefs - knowledge to revive the dead - was first possessed by Enki. In a long text dealing with Inanna/Ishtar's journey to the Lower World (southern Africa), the domain of her sister who was married to another son of Enki, the uninvited Goddess was put to death.
Responding to appeals, Enki fashioned medications and supervised the treatment of the corpse with sound and radiation pulses, and "Inanna arose." Evidently, the secret was not divulged to Marduk; and when he complained, his father gave him an evasive answer. That alone would have been enough to make the ambitious and power-hungry Marduk jealous of Thoth. The feeling of being offended, perhaps even threatened, was probably greater.
First, because it was Thoth, and not Marduk/Ra, who had helped Isis retrieve the dismembered Osiris (Ra's grandson) and save his semen, and then revived the poisoned Horus (a great-grandson of Ra).
And second, because all that led - as the Sumerian text makes clearer - to an affinity between Thoth and the star Sirius. the controller of the Egyptian calendar and the harbinger of the life-giving inundation of the Nile.
Were these the only reasons for the jealousy, or did Ra/Marduk have more compelling reasons to see in Thoth a rival, a threat to his supremacy? According to Manetho, the long reign of the first divine dynasty begun by Ra ended abruptly after only a short reign of three hundred years by Horus, after the conflict that we have called the First Pyramid War.
Then, instead of another descendant of Ra, it was Thoth who was given lordship over Egypt and his dynasty continued (according to Manetho) for 1,570 years. His reign, an era of peace and progress, coincided with the New Stone (Neolithic) Age in the Near East - the first phase of the granting of civilization by the Anunnaki to Mankind.
Why was it Thoth, of all the other sons of Ptah/Enki, who was chosen to replace the dynasty of Ra in Egypt? A clue might be suggested in a study titled Religion of the Ancient Egyptians by W. Osborn, Jr., in which it is stated as follows regarding Thoth:
With the complex rules of succession of the Anunnaki, where a son born to a half sister became the legal heir ahead of a firstborn son (if mothered not by a half sister) - a cause of the endless friction and rivalry between Enki (the firstborn of Anu) and Enlil (born to a half sister of Ann) - could it be that the circumstances of Thoth's birth somehow posed a challenge to Ra/Marduk's claims for supremacy? It is known that initially the dominating "company of the Gods" or divine dynasty was that of Heliopolis; later on it was superseded by the divine triad of Memphis (when Memphis became the capital of a unified Egypt).
But in between there was an interim Paul or ''divine company" of Gods headed by Thoth. The "cult center" of the latter was Hermopolis ("City of Hermes" in Greek) whose Egyptian name, Khemennu, meant "eight." One of the epithets of Thoth was "Lord of Eight," which according to Heinrich Brugsch (Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter) referred to eight celestial orientations, including the four cardinal points.
It could also refer to Thoth's ability to ascertain and mark out the eight standstill points of the Moon - the celestial body with which Thoth was associated. Marduk, a "Sun God," on the other hand, was associated with the number ten. In the numerical hierarchy of the Anunnaki, in which Anu's rank was the highest, sixty, that of Enlil fifty and of Enki forty (and so on down), the rank of Marduk was ten; and that could have been the origin of the decans.
Indeed, the Babylonian version of the Epic of Creation attributes to Marduk the devising of a calendar of twelve months each divided into three "celestial astrals":
This division of the skies into thirty-six portions as a means of "defining the days of the year" is as clear a reference as possible to the calendar - a calendar with thirtysix "decans." And here, in Enuma elish, the division is attributed to Marduk, alias Ra. The Epic of Creation, undoubtedly of Sumerian origin, is known nowadays mostly from its Babylonian rendition (the seven tablets of the Enuma elish).
It is a rendition, all scholars agree, that was intended to glorify the Babylonian national God Marduk. Hence, the name "Marduk was inserted where in the Sumerian original text the invader from outer space, the planet Nibiru, was described as the Celestial Lord; and where, describing deeds on Earth, the Supreme God was named Enlil, the Babylonian version also named Marduk. Thereby, Marduk was made supreme both in heaven and on Earth.
Without further discovery of intact or even fragmented tablets inscribed with the original Sumerian text of the Epic of Creation, it is impossible to say whether the thirty-six decans were a true innovation by Marduk or were just borrowed by him from Sumer. A basic tenet of Sumerian astronomy was the division of the celestial sphere enveloping the Earth into three "ways":
It has been thought that the three ways represented the equatorial band in the center and the bands demarcated by the two tropics, north and south; we have, however, shown in The 12th Planet that the Way of Anu, straddling the equator, extended 30° northward and southward of the equator, resulting in a width of 60°; and that the Way of Enlil and the Way of Ea similarly extended for 60° each, so that the three covered the complete celestial sweep of 180° from north to south.
If this tripartite division of the skies were to be applied to the calendrical division of the year into twelve months, the result would be thirty-six segments. Such a division - resulting in decans - was indeed made, in Babylon. In 1900, addressing the Royal Astronomical Society in London, the orientalist T.G. Pinches presented a reconstruction of a Mesopotamian astrolabe (literally: "Taker of stars"). It was a circular disk divided like a pie into twelve segments and three concentric rings, resulting in a division of the skies into thirty-six portions (Fig. 102).
Figure 102
The round symbols next to the inscribed names indicated that the reference was to celestial bodies; the names (here transliterated) are those of constellations of the zodiac, stars, and planets - thirty-six in all. That this division was linked to the calendar is made clear by the inscribing of the months' names, one in each of the twelve segments at the segment's top (the marking I to XII, starting with the first month Nisannu of the Babylonian calendar, is by Pinches).
While this Babylonian planisphere does not answer the question of the origin of the relevant verses in Enuma elish, it does establish that what was supposed to have been a unique and original Egyptian innovation in fact had a counterpart (if not a predecessor) in Babylon - the place claimed by Marduk for his supremacy. Even more certain is the fact that the thirty-six decans do not feature in the first Egyptian calendar.
The earlier one was linked to the Moon, the later one to the Sun. In Egyptian theology, Thoth was a Moon God, Ra was a Sun God. Extending this to the two calendars, it follows that the first and older Egyptian calendar was formulated by Thoth and the second, later one, by Ra/Marduk.
The fact is that when the time came, circa 3100 BC.. to extend the Sumerian level of civilization (human Kingship) to the Egyptians, Ra/Marduk - having been frustrated in his efforts to establish supremacy in Babylon - returned to Egypt and expelled Thoth. It was then, we believe, that Ra/Marduk - not for administrative convenience but in a deliberate step to eradicate the vestiges of Thoth's predominance - reformed the calendar.
A passage in the Book of the Dead relates that Thoth was "disturbed by what hath happened to the divine children" who have "done battle, upheld strife, created fiends, caused trouble." As a consequence of this Thoth "was provoked to anger when they [his adversaries] bring the years to confusion, throng in and push to disturb the months." All that evil, the text declares, "in all they have done unto thee, they have worked iniquity in secret."
This may well indicate that the strife that led to the substitution of Thoth's calendar by Ra/Marduk's calendar in Egypt took place when the calendar (for reasons explained earlier) needed to be put back on track. R.A. Parker, we have noted above, believes that this change occurred circa 2800 BC. Adolf Erman (Aegypten und Aegyptisches Leben im Altertum) was more specific.
The opportunity, he wrote, was the return of Sirius to its original position, after the 1,460-year cycle, on July 19, 2776 BC. It should be noted that that date, circa 2800 BC., is the official date adopted by the British authorities for Stonehenge I. The introduction by Ra/Marduk of a calendar divided into, or based upon, ten-day periods may have also been prompted by a desire to draw a clear distinction, for his followers in Egypt as well as in Mesopotamia, between himself and the one who was "seven" - the head of the Enlilites, Enlil himself. Indeed, such a distinction may have underlain the oscillations between lunar and solar calendars; for the calendars, as we have shown and ancient records attested, were devised by the Anunnaki "Gods" to delineate for their followers the cycles of worship; and the struggle for supremacy meant, in the final analysis, who was to be worshiped.
Scholars have long debated, but have yet to verify, the origin of the week, the slice of the year measured in lengths of seven days. We have shown in earlier books of The Earth Chronicles that seven was the number that represented our planet, the Earth. Earth was called in Sumerian texts "the seventh," and was depicted in representations of celestial bodies by the symbol of the seven dots (as in Fig. 94) because journeying into the center of our Solar System from their outermost planet, the Anunnaki would first encounter Pluto, pass by Neptune and Uranus (second and third), and continue past Saturn and Jupiter (fourth and fifth).
They would count Mars as the sixth (and therefore it was depicted as a six-pointed star) and Earth would be the seventh. Such a journey and such a count are in fact depicted on a planisphere discovered in the ruins of the royal library of Nineveh, where one of its eight segments (Fig. 103) shows the flight path from Nibiru and states (here in English translation) "deity Enlil went by the planets." The planets, represented by dots, are seven in number.
Figure 103
For the Sumerians, it was Enlil, and no other, who was "Lord of Seven." Mesopotamian as well as biblical names, of persons (e.g., Bath-sheba, "Daughter of Seven") or of places (e.g., BeerSheba, "the well of Seven") honored the God by this he importance or sanctity of the number seven, transferred to the calendrical unit of seven days as one week, permeates the Bible and other ancient scriptures. Abraham set apart seven ewe lambs when he negotiated with Abimelech; Jacob served Laban seven years to be able to marry one of his daughters, and bowed seven times as he approached his jealous brother Esau.
The High Priest was required to perform various rites seven times, Jericho was to be circled seven times so that its walls should tumble down; and calendrically, the seventh day had to be strictly observed as the Sabbath and the important festival of Pentecost had to take place after the count of seven weeks from Passover.
Though no one can say who "invented" the seven-day week, it is obviously associated in the Bible with the earliest times - indeed, when Time itself began: witness the seven days of Creation with which the book of Genesis begins. The concept of a seven-day delineated period of counted time, a Time of Man, is found in the biblical as well as the earlier Mesopotamian Deluge tale, thereby attesting to its antiquity.
In the Mesopotamian texts, the hero of the flood is given seven days' advance warning by Enki, who "opened the water clock and filled it" to make sure his faithful follower would not miss the deadline. In those versions the Deluge is said to have begun with a storm that "swept the country for seven days and seven nights." In the biblical version the Deluge also began after a seven-day advance warning to Noah.
The biblical talc of the flood and its duration reveals a far-reaching understanding of the calendar in very early times. Significantly, it shows familiarity with the unit of seven days and of a division of the year into fifty-two weeks of seven days each. Moreover, it suggests an understanding of the complexities of a lunar-solar calendar.
According to Genesis, the Deluge began "in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month" and ended the following year "in the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month." But what on the face of it would appear to be a period of 365 days plus ten, is not so.
The biblical tale breaks down the Deluge into 150 days of
the avalanche of water. 150 days during which the water receded,
and another forty days until Noah deemed it safe to open the Ark.
Then, in two seven-day intervals, he sent out a raven and a dove to
survey the landscape; only when the dove no longer came back did
Noah know it was safe to step out.
But 354 days is not a full year in solar terms. Recognizing this, the narrator or editor of Genesis resorted to intercalation, by stating that the Deluge, which began on the seventeenth day of the second month, ended (a year later) on the twenty-seventh of the second month. Scholars are divided in regard to the number of days thus added to the lunar 354.
Some (e.g., S. Gandz, Studies in Hebrew Mathematics and Astronomy) consider the addition to have been eleven days- - the correct intercalary addition that would have expanded the lunar 354 days to the full 365 days of the solar year. Others, among them the author of the ancient Book of Jubilees, consider the number of days added to be just ten, increasing the year in question to only 364 days.
The significance is, of course, that it implies a calendar divided into fifty-two weeks of seven days each (52 x 7 = 364). That this was not just a result of adding 354 + 10 as the number of days, but a deliberate division of the year into fifty-two weeks of seven days each, is made clear in the text of the Book of Jubilees.
It states (chapter 6) that Noah was given, when the Deluge ended, "heavenly tablets" ordaining that,
The insistence on a year of fifty-two weeks of seven days, adding up to a calendrical year of 364 days, was not a result of ignorance regarding the true length of 365 full days in a solar year.
The awareness of this true length is made clear in the Bible by the age ("five and sixty and three hundred years") of Enoch until he was lofted by the Lord. In the nonbiblical Book of Enoch the "overplus of the Sun," the five epagomenal days that had to be added to the 360 days (12 x 30) of other calendars, to complete the 365, are specifically mentioned.
Yet the Book of Enoch, in chapters describing the motions of the Sun and the Moon, the twelve zodiacal "portals," the equinoxes and the solstices, states unequivocally that the calendar year shall be "a year exact as to its days: three hundred and sixty-four." This is repeated in a statement that "the complete year, with perfect justice" was of 364 days - fifty-two weeks of seven days each.
The Book of Enoch, especially in its version known as Enoch II, is believed to show elements of scientific knowledge centered at the time in Alexandria, Egypt. How much of that can be traced back to the teachings of Thoth cannot be stated with any certainty; but biblical as well as Egyptian tales suggest a role for seven and fifty-two times seven beginning in much earlier times.
Well known is the biblical tale of Joseph's rise to governorship over Egypt after he had successfully interpreted the pharaoh's dreams of, first, seven fat-fleshed cows that were devoured by seven lean-fleshed cows, and then of seven full ears of corn swallowed up by seven dried-out ears of corn. Few are aware, however, that the tale - "legend" or "myth" to some - had strong Egyptian roots as well as an earlier counterpart in Egyptian lore.
Among the former was the Egyptian forerunner of the Greek Sibylline oracle Goddesses; they were called the Seven Hathors, Hathor having been the Goddess of the Sinai peninsula who was depicted as a cow. In other words, the Seven Hathors symbolized seven cows who could predict the future. The earlier counterpart of the tale of seven lean years that followed seven years of plenty is a hieroglyphic text (Fig. 104) that E.A.W. Budge (Legends of the Gods) titled "A legend of the God Khnemu and of a seven year famine."
Figure 104
Khnemu was another name for
Ptah/Enki in his role as fashioner of Mankind. The Egyptians
believed that after he had turned over lordship over Egypt to his
son Ra, he retired to the island of Abu (known as Elephantine since
Greek times because of its shape), where he formed twin caverns - two
connected reservoirs- - whose locks or sluices could be manipulated to
regulate the flow of the Nile's waters. (The modern Aswan High Dam
is similarly located above the Nile's first cataract).
Hoping that the spread of famine and chaos could be avoided by a direct appeal to the God, the king traveled south to the island of Abu. The God, he was told, dwells there "in an edifice of wood with portals formed of reeds," keeping with him "the cord and the tablet" that enable him to "open the double door of the sluices of the Nile."
Khnemu, responding to the king's pleadings, promised "to raise the level of the Nile, give water, make the crops grow." Since the annual rising of the Nile was linked to the heliacal rising of the star Sirius, one must wonder whether the tale's celestial or astronomical aspects recall not only the actual shortage of water (which occurs cyclically even nowadays) but also to the shift (discussed above) in the appearance of Sirius under a rigid calendar.
That the whole tale had calendrical connotations is suggested by the statement in the text that the abode of Khnemu at Abu was astronomically oriented: "The God's house hath an opening to the southeast, and the Sun standeth immediately opposite thereto every day." This can only mean a facility for ob serving the Sun in the course of moving to and from the winter solstice.
This brief review of the use and significance of the
number seven in the affairs of Gods and men suffices to show its
celestial origin (the seven planets from Pluto to Earth) and its calendrical
importance (the seven-day week, a year of fifty-two such weeks). But
in the rivalry among the Anunnaki, all that assumed another
significance: the determination of who was the God of Seven
(Eli-Sheva in Hebrew, from which Elizabeth comes) and thus the
titular Ruler of Earth.
Not only their number, seven, which implied veneration of Enlil; but their association with Hathor. an important deity in the Egyptian pantheon but one for whom Ra/Marduk had no particular liking. Hathor, we have shown in earlier books of The Earth Chronicles, was the Egyptian name for Ninharsag of the Sumerian pantheon - a half sister of both Enki and Enlil and the object of both brothers' sexual attention.
Since the official spouses of both (Ninki of Enki, Ninlil of Enlil) were not their half sisters, it was important for them to beget a son by Ninharsag; such a son, under the succession rules of the Anunnaki, would be the undisputed Legal Heir to the throne on Earth. In spite of repeated attempts by Enki, all Ninharsag bore him were daughters; but Enlil was more successful, and his Foremost Son was conceived in a union with Ninharsag.
This entitled Ninurta (Ningirsu, the "Lord of Girsu" to Gudea) to inherit his father's rank of fifty - at the same time depriving Enki's firstborn, Marduk, of rulership over the Earth. There were other manifestations of the spread of the worship of seven and its calendrical importance. The tale of the seven-year drought takes place at the time of Zoser, builder of the Saqqara pyramid.
Archaeologists have discovered in the area of Saqqara a circular "altar-top" of alabaster whose shape (Fig. 105) suggests that it was intended to serve as a sacred lamp to be lighted over a seven-day period. Another find is that of a stone "wheel" (some think it was the base of an omphalos, an oracular "navel stone") that is clearly divided into four segments of seven markers each (Fig. 106), suggesting that it was really a stone calendar - a lunar calendar, no doubt - incorporating the seven-day week concept and (with the aid of the four dividers) enabling a lunar monthly count ranging from twenty-eight to thirty-two days.
Figure 105
Figure 106
Calendars made of
stone had existed in antiquity, as evidence Stonehenge in Britain
and the Aztec calendar in Mexico. That this one was found in Egypt
should be the least wonder, for it is our belief that the genius
behind all of those geographically spread stone calendars was one
and the same God: Thoth. What may be surprising is this calendar's embracing the cycle of seven days; but that
too, as another Egyptian "legend" shows, should not have been
unexpected.
Figure 107
Archaeologists see in that no more than games with which to while away the time; but the usual number of holes, fifty-eight, is clearly an allocation of twenty-nine to each player - and twenty-nine is the number of full days in a lunar month. There were also obvious subdivisions of the holes into smaller groups, and grooves connected some holes to others (indicating perhaps that the player could jump-advance there).
We notice, for example, that hole 15 was connected to hole 22 and hole 10 to 24, which suggests a "jump" of one week of seven days and of a fortnight of fourteen days. Nowadays we employ ditties ('Thirty days hath September") and games to teach the modern calendar to children; why exclude the possibility that it was so also in antiquity? That these were calendar games and that at least one of them, the favorite of Thoth, wan designed to teach the division of the year into fifty-two weeks, is evident from an ancient Egyptian tale known as "The Adventures of Satni-Khamois with the Mummies."
It is a tale of magic, mystery, and adventure, an ancient thriller that combines the magical number fifty-two with Thoth and the secrets of the calendar. The tale is written on a papyrus (cataloged as Cairo-30646) that was discovered in a tomb in Thebes, dating to the third century BC.
Fragments of other papyruses with the same tale have also been found, indicating that it was part of the established or canonical literature of ancient Egypt that recorded the tales of Gods and men. The hero of this talc was Satni, a son of the pharaoh, "well instructed in all things." He was wont to wander in the necropolis of Memphis, studying the sacred writings on temple walls and researching ancient "books of magic." In time he himself became "a magician who had no equal in the land of Egypt."
One day a mysterious old man told him of a tomb "where there is deposited the book that the God Thoth had written with his own hand," and in which the mysteries of the Earth and the secrets of heaven were revealed. That secret knowledge included divine information concerning "the risings of the Sun and the appearances of the Moon and the motions of the celestial Gods [the planets] that are in the cycle [orbit] of the Sun"; in other words - the secrets of astronomy and the calendar.
The tomb in question was that of Ne-nofer-khe-ptah, the son of a former king. When Satni asked to be shown the location of this tomb, the old man warned him that although Nenoferkheptah was buried and mummified, he was not dead and could strike down anyone who dared take away the Book of Thoth that was lodged at his feet. Undaunted, Satni searched for the subterranean tomb, and when he reached the right spot he "recited a formula over it and a gap opened in the ground and Satni went down to the place where the book was."
Inside the tomb Satni saw the mummies of Nenofer-kheptah, of his sister-wife, and of their son. The book was indeed at Nenoferkheptah's feet, and it "gave off a light as if the sun shone there." As Satni stepped toward it, the wife's mummy spoke up, warning him to advance no further. She then told Satni of her own husband's adventures when he had attempted to obtain the book, for Thoth had hidden it in a secret place, inside a golden box that was inside a silver box that was inside a series of other boxes within boxes, the outermost ones being of bronze and iron.
When her husband, Nenoferkheptah, ignored the warnings and the dangers and grasped the book, Thoth condemned him and his wife and their son to suspended animation: although alive, they were buried; and although mummified, they could see, hear, and speak. She warned Satni that if he touched the book, his fate would be the same or worse. The warnings and the fate of the earlier king did not deter Satni.
Having come so far, he was determined to get the book. As he took another step toward the book, the mummy of Nenoferkheptah spoke up. There was a way to possess the book without incurring the wrath of Thoth, he said: to play and win the Game of Fifty-Two, "the magical number of Thoth."
Challenging fate, Satni agreed. He lost the first game and found himself partly sunk into the floor of the tomb. He lost the next game, and the next, sinking down more and more into the ground. How he managed to escape with the book, the calamities that befell him as a result, and how he in the end returned the book to its hiding place, makes fascinating reading but is unessential to our immediate subject: the fact that the astronomical and calendrical "secrets of Thoth" included the Game of Fifty-Two - the division of the year into fifty-two seven-day portions, resulting in the enigmatic year of only 364 days of the books of Jubilees and Enoch.
It is a magical number that vaults us across the oceans, to the Americas, returns us to the enigma of Stonehenge, and parts the curtains on the events leading to, and resulting from, the first New Age recorded by Mankind.
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