by Bruce E. R. Thompson.
On the afternoon of January 4th, 2019, I found myself in the depths of the Red Pyramid in Egypt, looking out a long shaft at a little patch of sky. My wife and I were planning a river cruise up the Nile River, but we arrived in Cairo a few days early to explore Egypt on our own. On the day before the cruise we hired a cabbie to take us to Saqqara to see the oldest pyramids. Our last pyramid of the day was the Red Pyramid—the third oldest pyramid in Egypt, and the first “true” pyramid to be successfully completed. It is in remarkably good condition for being roughly 4600 years old. It is the only pyramid tourists are still permitted to enter by climbing up the side of the pyramid and down a narrow sloping shaft that connects the interior of the pyramid to the sky.
The pyramids were, of course, constructed as tombs for the pharaohs. The Red Pyramid was built for Snefru, a pharaoh of the early Old Kingdom. It has been suggested that the long shaft—every pyramid has one—gives the pyramids a secondary purpose: they were also astronomical observatories. However, rather than calling that a “secondary purpose,” I think it would be better to say that the shaft completed the pyramid’s primary purpose, which was to be not so much a sepulcher as a transit station. The pharaohs of Egypt believed that they would live again. After death they would become one with the god Osiris, god of the dead, and face the travails of the underworld. They would then journey into the heavens to be reborn as Horus, the son of Osiris and rightful king of the gods. To travel to the heavens, they needed an exit.
Hence the shaft.
But the shaft had to do more than point at the sky; it had to point at a particular place in the sky: at a star—a deity—capable of guiding pharaoh out of the tomb. So, while the pyramids may not have been observatories in the sense we use the word, they were built to align with a particular star. That star had to be visible from the bottom of the shaft on a particular day—the day of pharaoh’s ascension. The most likely star for the purpose would have been Sirius, the brightest star in the sky (aside from the Sun of course). The Egyptians associated Sirius with the goddess Isis, the mother of Horus. Her rising was thought to herald the beginning of the annual flooding of the Nile, the rebirth of life, and the beginning of a new year.
As I sat in the bowels of the Red Pyramid looking out that perfectly straight shaft at a tiny postage-stamp of gradually fading afternoon sky, it all made sense. But, then, as I was lying in bed that evening, trying to go to sleep, I had a sudden, horrible realization: the pyramids didn’t work! The shaft in the side of the Red Pyramid may have pointed directly at Sirius 4590 years ago, when the architects were planning its construction, but it no longer does. Indeed, even by the time the pyramid was completed, the star may have drifted slightly to the left of dead center. Like a spinning top, the Earth wobbles on its axis. As a result, the stars move through the sky roughly one degree every 72 years. This is known as “the precession of the equinoxes.” The stars lose ground against the equinoxes, and thus against the seasons. Spring comes 20 minutes sooner every year, as measured by the stars! The pyramids, being firmly planted on the ground, move with the wobble of the Earth and so follow the seasons. They do not follow the stars.
An agricultural society needs to know when planting season will arrive, so every ancient agricultural civilization has some way of tracking the seasons. The ancient Neolithic people of Britain built Stonehenge for that purpose. Machu Picchu served that purpose for the ancient Peruvians. Angkor Wat, in Southeast Asia, is oriented so the rising sun on the solstices can be observed through various windows. In Teotihuacán the avenue leading up to the Great Pyramid of the Sun is precisely aligned with the setting of the sun on April 30. In Mexico, May 1 is a good day to begin planting. Ancient Egypt was also an agricultural society, so it would be shocking if they did not also have an observatory capable of tracking the arrival of planting season, and, if Egypt was anything like the other ancient civilizations, they would have used their largest, most impressive monuments for that very purpose.
The Egyptians built pyramids during the period known as the Old Kingdom. A few pyramids were built during the Middle Kingdom, but only a few. By the end of the Middle Kingdom, the Egyptians had given up on pyramids and turned to building temples instead. They began work on a temple that, over a millennium and a half, became the largest temple complex in the world, surpassing even the pyramids in grandeur: the great temple of Amun-Re at Karnak. The temple of Amun-Re is, incidentally, perfectly aligned with sunrise on the vernal equinox. No surprise there.
It is sometimes asked why the Egyptians quit building pyramids. It has been suggested that they gave it up because all the pyramids were looted by grave robbers. If the remains of the pharaoh must remain undisturbed, then they must be hidden from looters. A grand monument is like a neon sign over a grave proclaiming, “Rich treasure here! Come and get it!” So the pharaohs were buried in the Valley of the Kings, just across the Nile from Karnak, instead.
This theory may have made sense to 19th Century archaeologists, who built whole careers trying to find the underground crypts in the Valley of the Kings, so they could be looted in the name of science. The entrances were hard to find, buried under centuries of windblown sand and gravel. An archaeologist could consider himself lucky if he managed, in the course of a long career, to find even one of them.
But upon consideration, this theory falls apart. When the pharaohs were first entombed, the centuries had not yet had time to hide the entrances. A generation of workmen knew precisely where the new chambers were, because they had carved them out and painted stories on their walls. Moreover, the Valley of the Kings is clearly marked—as clearly as any pyramid—by a tall outcropping of rock that towers above the valley. The rock is shaped like a giant pyramid. The tombs were not hidden in the Valley of the Kings: the marker could be seen from miles around. Everyone in ancient Egypt knew where the tombs were located. And, in point of fact, nearly all of the tombs were looted, just as the pyramids had been.
I think the Egyptians quit building pyramids because pyramids didn’t work as planned. Like other ancient structures, the pyramids were built so priests could predict the arrival of planting season. But the priests of the Old Kingdom were not aware of the precession of the equinoxes! They built structures designed to track the return of Sirius to its highest place in the sky each year. But Sirius is a star. Each year the seasons came just a bit earlier. A pyramid may have worked adequately for about fifty years or so. But then Sirius could no longer be seen in the tiny window at the end of the shaft. Thinking the previous architect had simply gotten it wrong, they built another pyramid, and then another, and another. Eventually, they realized that the sky itself was out of whack. The gods had made a terrible blunder. The sky was broken!
There is a myth to explain what happened. The gods involved were Horus and his wicked uncle Set. Set slew Osiris and attempted to usurp the throne as king of the gods. Horus hid for a while, until he grew powerful enough to challenge Set. Then the two gods engaged in a series of battles, in the course of which Horus managed to emasculate Set (making the desert regions, where Set ruled, infertile) and Set put out one of Horus’ eyes. Horus is the god of the sky. The eyes of Horus are, of course, the Sun and the Moon. The Moon is the damaged eye, since it glows less brightly than the Sun, and neither of the two eyes-in-the-sky move in coordination with the motion of the stars. Set broke the sky, and the seasons no longer turn with the movement of the heavens.
Other cultures tell similar stories about different gods. In Iceland the sky god Amlodhi owned a mill for grinding his corn. The mill would grind out whatever the god wished. But the mill was stolen by another god, who accidently dropped it into the sea causing it to break. Now the mill only grinds out salt, which explains why seawater is salty.
The wobble of the Earth on its axis can be taken as emblematic of all the other bizarre irregularities with which the Universe is rife. Planets do not move in perfect circles as people used to believe. They don’t even move in ellipses as Kepler thought. They move in ever changing spirals, like a Spirograph toy in the hands of a two-year-old. The Earth itself is not a perfect sphere, but slightly fatter in the North, and slightly flattened from pole to pole. Life on Earth continues to evolve because no species is perfectly adapted to its environment—and cannot be, because environments themselves constantly change. Human technology consistently causes almost as many problems as it solves. Wherever we look, perfection eludes us—and it isn’t our fault! The Universe itself is out of whack.
It is all the fault of the gods.