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7. With 36 days from Phaet to Naos it is a natural thought to search for the midpoint between them (where according to Allen Sirius should be):
2 * 9 = 18 = 36 / 2. However we have located Sirius to a position 2 days earlier:
The meaning of these 11 glyphs we have speculated about in Camp 9: ... The dark time at the beginning of side a can therefore hardly refer to the whole of side a. Instead it could refer to the season of winter solstice. 122 - 87 = 35. Though if we instead should count the difference between 122 and 89 (the distance from winter solstice to spring equinox north of the equator) we will arrive at Canopus. And if we should count from the 1st of January we will reach to ω Gemini, because 122 - 80 = 42. The first line of glyphs on side a could represent winter solstice and the first glyphs in line a2 could be a description of how light is about to return. Alhena is γ Gemini and the Twins ('The Doublegood Pair') was in ancient times announcing the return of Sun at spring equinox ... I implied there could be several ways to count cycles of time in G and that the first 11 glyphs in line a2 may have been designed to accomodate at least 3 such cycles:
Perhaps this part of the G text is a faint echo of the 'Lady of Every Joy': ... In the inscriptions of Dendera, published by Dümichen, the goddess Hathor is called 'lady of every joy'. For once, Dümichen adds: Literally ... 'the lady of every heart circuit'. This is not to say that the Egyptians had discovered the circulation of the blood. But the determinative sign for 'heart' often figures as the plumb bob at the end of a plumb line coming from a well-known astronomical or surveying device, the merkhet. Evidently, 'heart' is something very specific, as it were the 'center of gravity' ... See Aeg.Wb. 2, pp. 55f. for sign of the heart (ib) as expressing generally 'the middle, the center'. And this may lead in quite another direction. The Arabs preserved a name for Canopus - besides calling the star Kalb at-tai-man ('heart of the south') ... Suhail el-wezn, 'Canopus Ponderosus', the heavy-weighing Canopus, a name promptly declared meaningless by the experts, but which could well have belonged to an archaic system in which Canopus was the weight at the end of the plumb line, as befitted its important position as a heavy star at the South Pole of the 'waters below'. Here is a chain of inferences which might or might not be valid, but it is allowable to test it, and no inference at all would come from the 'lady of every joy'. The line seems to state that Hathor (= Hat Hor, 'House of Horus') 'rules' the revolution of a specific celestial body - whether or not Canopus is alluded to - or, if we can trust the translation 'every', the revolution of all celestial bodies. As concerns the identity of the ruling lady, the greater possibility speaks for Sirius, but Venus cannot be excluded; in Mexico, too, Venus is called 'heart of the earth' ... We must, of course, postpone a definite judgment. For instance should we at some later time try to put the cycle of Venus in parallel with the glyphs in G. The pigeon bird (Phaet) is descending at one end and at the other end of the X line the little dog Procyon is ascending, evidently with 1 month between them:
It could be a message that Sun is at solstice for 30 days, and perhaps the distance from Phaet to Procyon is the measure ('cubit') for another cycle to count with. 116 = 4 * 29 and 494 + 30 = 524. |
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