123. Assuming for the sake of our discussion that the 'good' letter θ denoted the midline between the twin half-years at the ancient equinox, ... θ is the last star in the Ara constellation, and the ancient meaning of this letter was described as a wheel by the Phoenicians but for the Egyptian it meant 'good'. When the wheel of time has come full cycle around and the upside down fire-altar is in the past the times ahead should be good (or lucky Sa'ad) ... we can then can guess the other letter Φ denoted the midline between the other pair of half-years at the ancient solstice, as perhaps was alluded to in this Punarvasu coin, where it was placed after the tail (i.e. after the end) of the horse of Pollux (the Eastern One of the Twins):  ... Isaac Taylor, History of the Alphabet: Semitic Alphabets, Part 1, 2003: 'The old explanation, which has again been revived by Halévy, is that it denotes an 'ape,' the character Q being taken to represent an ape with its tail hanging down. It may also be referred to a Talmudic root which would signify an 'aperture' of some kind, as the 'eye of a needle,' ... Lenormant adopts the more usual explanation that the word means a 'knot' ...
... Its
leading star is said to be 'q Cancri'. Strangely the
internet site Chinese Astronomy never uses
Greek letters for the stars, e.g. is Tejat Posterior
(μ
Gemini) referred to as 'm Gemini'. However, there is
no Greek letter corresponding to the letter 'q'.
Possibly the idea is to refer to the ancient Greek
letter koppa, a reasonable sign for something
dead and only living on in peoples' minds.
There is no star q Cancri (or similar) according to
Wikipedia ...  ... The king, wearing now a short, stiff archaic mantle, walks in a grave and stately manner to the sanctuary of the wolf-god Upwaut, the 'Opener of the Way', where he anoints the sacred standard and, preceded by this, marches to the palace chapel, into which he disappears. A period of time elapses during which the pharaoh is no longer manifest.When he reappears he is clothed as in the Narmer palette, wearing the kilt with Hathor belt and bull's tail attatched. In his right hand he holds the flail scepter and in his left, instead of the usual crook of the Good Shepherd, an object resembling a small scroll, called the Will, the House Document, or Secret of the Two Partners, which he exhibits in triumph, proclaiming to all in attendance that it was given him by his dead father Osiris, in the presence of the earth-god Geb. 'I have run', he cries, 'holding the Secret of the Two Partners, the Will that my father has given me before Geb. I have passed through the land and touched the four sides of it. I traverse it as I desire.' ...
Perhaps the idea of the 'Gate of Cancer' motivated 'q Cancri' in the internet site Chinese Astronomy: ... Men's spirits were thought to dwell in the Milky Way between incarnations. This conception has been handed down as an Orphic and Pythagorean tradition fitting into the frame of the migration of the soul. Macrobius, who has provided the broadest report on the matter, has it that souls ascend by way of Capricorn, and then, in order to be reborn, descend again through the 'Gate of Cancer'. Macrobius talks of signs; the constellations rising at the solstices in his time (and still in ours) were Gemini and Sagittarius: the 'Gate of Cancer' means Gemini ... And the number of 'eyes' (mata) in Φ could be simply a matter of what type of measuring rod was used:
In Aa1-53, for instance the maitaki (good) glyph could perhaps illustrate how there is one cycle of vegetation in the north and another in the south with the equatorial belt in between. In Ha6-34 and Pa5-75 the description could instead refer to 3 * 118 = 354 days, with the 4th quarter not visualized because it was unlucky - the place where the Old Sun had to be re-placed. ... Interestingly, since another meaning of shi is 'death', the number 4 is considered unlucky. For example, the floor numbering in hotels sometimes jumps mysteriously from 3 to 5; it is also considered unlucky to give four of something as a present ... What was 'good' (in Punarvasu, in θ, in Φ, in the maitaki glyphs, and in the caduceus of Mercury) was probably the fluid dynamics of life: ... The old man realized that he was now at a critical point. If the Nazarene did not understand this business of coming and going, he would not understand anything else. He wanted to say that what made life was not so much force as the movement of forces. He reverted to the idea of a universal shuttle service. 'The rays drink up the little waters of the earth, the shallow pools, making them rise, and then descend again in rain.' Then, leaving aside the question of water, he summed up his argument: 'To draw up and then return what one had drawn - that is the life of the world.'
Furthermore, we can guess the number of glyphs on side a of the G tablet (229) was set to be equal to the difference beetween 365 and 136. The day number for Alcyone at the time of rongorongo was 136 (May 16) which 'happened' to coincide with the distance from Castor to Antares:
Early in my investigations I became convinced the 6 'black berries' in front in Ga7-15 were referring to Tau-ono (the 6 'stones' in the Pleiades). However, the first 6 stars in the Pleiades (marking the final of the previous cycle) rose with the Sun in May 15, which I at that time could not connect in any covincing way with day 328 (November 24). But now we can see why the creator of the G text could have decided to here use a reference to Tau-ono, because in the traditions north of the equator the heliacal return of the Pleiades marked a change of season from winter to summer, an event which south of the equator would have corresponded to the heliacal return of Antares. 136 was the measure to be used in both cases:
... another Alcyone, daughter of Pleione, 'Queen of Sailing', by the oak-hero Atlas, was the mystical leader of the seven Pleiads. The heliacal rising of the Pleiads in May marked the beginning of the navigational year; their setting marked its end when (as Pliny notices in a passage about the halcyon) a remarkably cold North wind blows ...
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
