Gb6-28 is glyph 181 counted from the beginning of side b. A pattern with 181 followed by 290 seems to have been planned by the creator of the text:
181 could have been motivated by the distance in days from Aldebaran (148, May 28) to Antares (329, November 25). 290 was probably meant to measure out 10 months with 29 days in each. The Tahua text has marked multiples of 29 by the use of viri glyphs:
In G there is a viri which may have been used to determine where a year with 290 days was beginning:
Counting also the empty glyph position before Ga1-1 the total number on the tablet becomes 471 + 1 = 471 = 2 * 236 = 8 * 59. 472 is also equal to 182 + 5 + 285 (which in turn equals 365 - 80):
472, 236, and 118, are obviously multiples of the synodic lunar month (29½), but a break in this pattern could have been motivated by the yearly cycle of the Sun. 29½ * 13 = 383½ > 365¼ > 12 * 29½ = 354. At the time of the Hyades Gate (Taurus) day 383 was at Gb6-28 and JANUARY 18 (described according to our Gregorian map used for the right ascension positions at that ancient time). A Sun calendar is not easy to integrate in a lunar structure. The solution above is, I suggest, beginning with the first 2 quarters of a 364-day long year, followed by 5 special days outside the ordinary calendar. ... Nut, whom the Greeks sometimes identified with Rhea, was goddess of the sky, but it was debatable if in historical times she was the object of a genuine cult. She was Geb's twin sister and, it was said, married him secretly and against the will of Ra. Angered, Ra had the couple brutally separated by Shu and afterwards decreed that Nut could not bear a child in any given month of any year. Thoth, Plutarch tells us, happily had pity on her. Playing draughts with the Moon, he won in the course of several games a seventy-second part of the Moon's light with which he composed five new days. As these five intercalated days did not belong to the official Egyptian calendar of three hundred and sixty days, Nut was thus able to give birth successively to five children: Osiris, Haroeris (Horus), Set, Isis and Nepthys ... Possibly, therefore, the creator of the text intended Gb7-1 to represent the first (zero) day in the first half of a Sun year:
It was probably no coincidence the mutilated moa in Gb7-1 was placed 29 days after the similarly mishandled moa in Gb5-29. 355 (DECEMBER 21) + 29 = 384 (JANUARY 19):
An entity which has been opened up to the dangerous world outside cannot survive - it is dead. |