CHAPTER 4
Celebrations of Sun and Earth in the Ancient Near East
THE IMPRESSIVE PHENOMENON of ancient Egyptian civilization—with its advanced medicine, engineering, mathematics, and astronomy—sprang into being virtually full-blown. Archaeologists are predisposed to explain this cultural explosion in the Nile valley some four-and-a-half thousand years ago as the result of a long period of development, or of influence from other, older centers of civilization. But these explanations never quite succeed. Any visit to a good collection of Egyptian artifacts, as at the British Museum, or even an hour with a book of photographs of pyramids and temples leaves the distinct impression that the earliest hieroglyphics, paintings, sculptures, and buildings of the Old Kingdom represented by far the clearest expression and fullest flowering of the Egyptian genius. All that came later, through nearly three millennia of pharaonic history, seems to have derived merely from the imitation and repetition of elements contained in an initial burst of inspiration.
While our understanding of ancient Egyptian society is still imperfect, nearly every scholar who has studied it has come to the conclusion that religion and magic formed its entire basis. The Egyptians were preoccupied with the meaning of life and death, with religious symbolism of all kinds, with astronomy, and with the principles of harmony and proportion as applied to the interconnected cycles of the cosmic, human, natural, and supernatural worlds.
To the Egyptians, the Sun was Re, the chief of the gods, who created the world and governed it during the First Time, a Golden Age of peace and plenty. Amenhotep IV, the heretical pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, made the Sun the only god, which he worshiped as Aton—an Egyptian word that referred to the physical disk of the Sun (the other solar names Re, Atum, Horus, and Amun, in contrast, had mythological associations). He called himself Akhenaton (“The Glory of Aton”), and moved the capital of Egypt from Thebes to a new city, built in the center of the country, which he called Akhetaton. He forbade the artistic representation of other deities, and no images of Aton were allowed save that of the solar disk with its rays outstretched toward Earth, each ending with a hand proffering the symbol for life. In a Hymn to Aton by Akhenaton or his royal poet, found inscribed on a mausoleum for the father of Nefertiti, the Pharaoh’s wife, we read:
Thou dost appear beautiful on the horizon of heaven,
O living Aton, thou who wast the first to live.
When thou hast risen on the eastern horizon,
Thou hast filled every land with thy beauty.…
When thou dost set on the western horizon,
The earth is in darkness, resembling death.…
At daybreak, when thou dost rise on the horizon,
Dost shine as Aton by day,
Thou dost dispel the darkness
And shed thy rays.
The two lands are in a festive mood,
Awake, and stand on their feet,
For thou hast raised them up;
They cleanse their bodies and take their garments;
Their arms are lifted in adoration at thine appearing;
The whole land performs its labor.
All beasts are satisfied with their pasture;
Trees and plants are verdant.
The birds which fly from their nests, their wings are spread
in adoration to thy soul.…
Akhenaton, who added to his name the phrase “Living in Truth,” encouraged the artists of the new royal city to paint in a naturalistic style and did away with the severe etiquette traditional to the royal household. But his reform was widely opposed and ended with his death. His works were obliterated, and later generations of Egyptians regarded him with contempt. His son and successor Tutankhamen reinstated the theocracy of the Theban priesthood, but died before reaching the age of twenty. Soon afterward the Eighteenth Dynasty ended in chaos, and with it passed the last great flowering of the Egyptian genius.
For a people who worshiped the Sun, both as a mythological idea and as an all-important daily celestial phenomenon, the Solstices and Equinoxes must have appeared as divinely ordained temporal thresholds. And, as the Egyptians’ astronomy was focused on the eastern horizon, they aligned many of their temples to Solstice and Equinox sunrise points.
We can perhaps best appreciate the Egyptian worldview as it is reflected in architecture. As an example, the Temple of Amen-Ra at Karnak is, according to Sir J. Norman Lockyer, the great nineteenth-century pioneer of the science of archaeoastronomy, “beyond all question the most majestic ruin in the world.” It was rebuilt by Pharaoh Thutmose III of the Eighteenth Dynasty, whose period (about 1480 B.C.E., in the early phase of the New Kingdom) represented the last flourishing of design and construction before the gradual decline of the Egyptian civilization. Parts of Karnak seem to be much older, however, dating perhaps to the Eleventh or Twelfth Dynasties of the Middle Kingdom. On the basis of astronomical considerations, Lockyer proposed that the foundations of the shrine must have been laid in the year 3700 B.C.E., or nearly a millennium before the building of the Old Kingdom pyramids—a date with which few modern Egyptologists would agree.
View along the Peristyle Hall of the Great Temple of Amen-Ra at Karnak.
What is beyond question, though, is that the Great Temple at Karnak incorporates Solstice alignments. Lockyer proposed that the main hall is oriented to the summer Solstice sunset. “There is a sort of stone avenue in the centre,” he wrote,
giving a view towards the north-west, and this axis is something like five hundred yards in length. The whole object of the builder of the great temple at Karnak—one of the most soul-stirring temples which have ever been conceived or built by man—was to preserve that axis absolutely open; and all the wonderful halls of columns and the like, as seen on one side or other of the axis, are merely details; the point being that the axis should be absolutely open, straight, and true.1
Plan of the Great Temple at Karnak.
On the day of the Solstice, according to Lockyer, a beam of light would illuminate a sanctuary in the interior of the temple for no more than two or three minutes, during which time there would be an observable peak of brightness. This dramatic spotlighting effect would have allowed the Egyptian priests to determine the length of the solar year to within a minute.
The lighting effect would also have served religious purposes. Lockyer notes that “the most solemn ceremonial…in the whole year was that which took place on New Year’s morning, or the great festival of the Nile-rising and summer Solstice, the 1st of Thoth.”2 This solstitial celebration “not only dominated the industry, but the astronomy and religion of Egypt.…“3 In solemn processions, priests carried statues of Hapi—the god of the Nile—through the streets of towns and villages. Then, according to Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge, “When the inundation was abundant the rejoicings which took place after the performance of the religious ceremonies…were carried out on a scale of great magnificence, and all classes kept holiday.”4
The axis of the smaller Temple of Ra-Hor-Ahkty, attached to the great hall at Karnak, is oriented to sunrise on the winter Solstice, as is the window of the High Room of the Sun in the same temple complex. The Temples of Thebes and Abydos are similarly oriented, and so also the sixty-foot-high Colossi of Memnon on the plain on the other side of the Nile from Karnak, along with (probably) their associated ruined temple.
The rooftop temple at karnak knows as the High Room of the Sun.
Plan of the small High Room of the Sun, showing the window opening to the winter Solstice sunrise.
The Pyramids and the Sphinx at Gizeh, and their surrounding temples (the Temples of Isis and of Osiris), on the other hand, are oriented east-west, toward the Equinox sunrise. The same is true of the pyramids at Memphis, Sais and Tanis.
The ancient Egyptians possessed a genius for making the maximum use of the simplest principles and tools, both in engineering and in theoretical science. And it seems that it was through the astute use of their temple-observatories that they became aware of the slow precessional motion of the Earth’s axis. Giorgio de Santillana of MIT has written that “when a stellar temple is oriented so accurately that it requires several reconstructions at intervals of a few centuries, which involve each time the rebuilding of its narrow alignment,” as was true of Egyptian structures oriented to the rising of certain bright stars, and when these rebuildings are dated not with hieroglyphs representing years in relation to political events but by bas-relief zodiacs showing the position of the constellations (as is the case at the Temple of Hathor at Dendera), “then it is not reasonable to suppose the Egyptians unaware of the Precession of the Equinoxes, even if their mathematics was unable to predict it numerically.”5
The indigenous religions of the Near East centered in nature and agriculture and, as elsewhere in Neolithic times, focused on images of the Goddess. In Anatolia (now Turkey) around 7000 B.C.E., in the cities of Hacilar and Catal Huyuk, the Goddess was represented in three aspects: young woman, mother giving birth to a child, and crone. Often she was accompanied by a leopard or a bull. The presence of funeral gifts in burials suggests a cult of the dead as well. These Anatolian cultures were followed by the Tell Halaf peoples (again, worshipers of the Goddess), and the Ubaidi (ca. 4300 B.C.E.), who flourished throughout Mesopotamia. The Ubaidi built monumental temples, worked in copper and gold, and developed agriculture and commerce to the highest levels known in prehistoric times.
History begins with writing, and the first people to use writing extensively were the Sumerians of Mesopotamia. No one knows where they came from; their language was not related to any other known tongue, and they seem to have appeared on the scene suddenly and with an already highly developed culture around 4000 B.C.E. Later, beginning perhaps around 3000 B.C.E., groups of Semitic Akkadians began to descend on the Sumerian cities. This resulted first in cultural symbiosis, then in conquest. Around 2300 B.C.E., an Akkadian king, Sargon, established an empire throughout Mesopotamia, which endured for a century before collapsing in the face of attacks by nomads from the upper Tigris. In the centuries that followed, Babylonian and Assyrian empires repeatedly arose from the Akkadian-Sumerian cultural synthesis, exerted temporary supremacy, then fell to barbarians from the north.
That the Babylonians and Assyrians knew of the Solstices is nearly certain (since the excavated temple at Khorsabad in ancient Assyria, modern Iraq, faces northeast, toward the summer Solstice sunrise). But they seem to have placed greater importance on the Equinoxes.
The most important festival in the Babylonian calendar was the beginning of the New Year, which occurred at the spring Equinox (or, in earliest times, at the autumn Equinox). This was the akitu, a twelve-day ceremony in which the king, as the son and representative of the divinity, regenerated and synchronized the rhythms of nature, cosmos, and human society.
The main elements of the akitu ceremony were as follows:
a. On the first day, the gods of the entire region were invited into the city and the festival. Sacrifices were offered and ritual statuettes fashioned. Then the social order was reversed, so that slaves became masters; all order and hierarchy were abolished, so that the world would symbolically return to chaos.
b. On the fourth day, the priests recited the story of Creation (the Enuma elish) in the temples, and two groups of actors mimed the struggle between Marduk (the Creator) and Tiamat (the dragon of chaos).
c. On the fifth day, the chief priest approached the king, stripped him of his royal insignia, and struck him on the cheek. If tears flowed, it was understood that the land would prosper. The king prostrated himself in prayer before restoring his regalia and offering the evening sacrifice.
d. On the eighth day, at a special New Year festival house which was reached by procession and decorated barge, the king and the high priests determined omens for each of the twelve months of the new year in a ceremony called “the fixing of the destinies.”
e. Finally, the king (representing Marduk) and a high priestess (representing the divine consort Sarpanitu) entered into hierogamy, or sacred marriage, thus ensuring the fertility of the kingdom. This was followed by a period of collective orgy and feasting that took place beyond the bounds of the city.
The akitu ceremony, in its enactment of the yearly return to chaos followed by a new creation, was exemplary of New Year celebrations and festivals throughout the ancient world. As historian of religions Mircea Eliade once put it, “there is everywhere a conception of the end and the beginning of a temporal period, based on the observation of biocosmic rhythms and forming a part of a larger system—the system of periodic purifications (cf. purges, fasting, confession of sins, etc.) and of the periodic regeneration of life.”6
Between Mesopotamia and Egypt there flourished an agricultural people, referred to in the Bible as Canaanites, whose religion was characterized by the worship of stones and pillars, trees, and sacred wells. Their high god was El—a name that appears in the Old Testament in its plural form, Elohim. El was at first a generic term for divinity, but later came to refer to the head of the Canaanite pantheon, a sky god called “holy,” “merciful,” “Father of Gods and Men.”
The pantheon included, as principal goddesses, Asherah and Anath; Asherah was the wife of El and the mother of the rest of the gods. The cypress, myrtle, and palm were sacred to her, and her symbol was the two-horned cow. The Canaanites worshiped her through temple prostitution and also through seasonal festivals.
A colossal hewn stone at Baalbek.
While few details of the Canaanite seasonal festivals survive, there is reason to believe that they were synchronized with the Equinoxes and Solstices. The Lebanese town of Baalbek, once known as Heliopolis (the Sun-City), contains the ruins of an ancient temple oriented due east, toward the Equinox sunrise. This temple complex, rebuilt by the Romans, incorporates three hewn stones of extraordinary size that weigh upwards of 750 tons each. Ancient Arab legends say that the first temples of Baal-Astarte at Baalbek were built shortly after the Flood by a tribe of giants.
From the time of Joshua onward, the indigenous Canaanite religion exerted a powerful influence on that of the invading Israelites. Among the latter, the worship of Baal and Astarte, the observance of the local ritual system and sacred sites, the organization of a priestly caste along Canaanite models, and the observance of the seasonal festivals all attested to the depth of this influence. The Israelites, who had been a nomadic, animal-herding people, were becoming agriculturalists, and it must have seemed natural to them to borrow elements from the nature-religion of the farmers among whom they had come to live. Followers of Baal saw the sprouting and decay of vegetation, the ripening of fruits, and the seasonal movement of the Sun as evidence of the activity of their god.
But for the still-nomadic herdsmen of the stony-hilled regions of southern Palestine, the worship of Baal and Astarte seemed to threaten the unique moral and spiritual elements of their own worship of Yahweh. They had come to see human history—rather than nature—as the sphere of divine activity. There was ongoing conflict, therefore, between proponents of Yahwism and Baalism among the Hebrews throughout the first millennium B.C.E.
Nevertheless, the ultimate incorporation of elements of nature-religion into the Judaic heritage is attested by the fact that the most significant ancient religious structure for the Jews (and later for Christians as well), Solomon’s fabulous temple at Jerusalem, was oriented to the Equinox sunrise. Each spring Equinox, at the time of the ancient agricultural festival of sowing, sunlight was allowed to penetrate the length of an open passage from the doorway of the temple over the high altar and into the Holy of Holies. It was on this occasion, and this occasion only, that the High Priest entered the sactum sanctorum. Norman Lockyer notes that “There is evidence…that the entrance of the sunlight on the morning of the spring Equinox formed part of the ceremonial. The priest being in the naos [the Holy Place], the worshipers outside, with their backs to the sun, could see the high priest by means of the sunlight reflected from the jewels in his garment.” He quotes a statement of the Roman historian Josephus to the effect that these jewels “shined out when God was present at their sacrifices…being seen even by those who were most remote; which splendour yet was not before natural to the stone.”7
It is of course possible that the observance of the Exquinoxes and Solstices was indigenous to the Hebraic tradition, though I know of no ancient evidence for this. There is, however, a passage in a fifteen-hundred-year-old Jewish commentary in “Abodah Zarah” in the Babylonian Talmud, which describes Adam’s discovery of the winter Solstice following his expulsion from Eden. Noticing that the days were growing shorter, he fasted and prayed for eight days; it being exactly Midwinter, his efforts appeared to have succeeded, for soon the days were lengthening again. Every year thereafter, Adam repeated his ritual.
A reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.