With almost 1,500 known deities, countless temples and tombs and a detailed surviving literature, the mythology of the great civilisation of the Nile is considered the most sophisticated religious system ever devised. There is no such thing as a single story or tradition, partly because the dynastic period of Egyptian civilisation waxed and waned for over 3,000 years. However, central to both life and mythology are the waters of the Nile, the great provider for this desert civilisation. The annual floods created a fertile strip along the river that is strikingly visible when flying into Luxor from Cairo, although since 1970 the Aswan Dam has halted the ancient cycle of rising and falling waters and today the verdant banks are maintained by modern irrigation techniques. The rains still fall on the mountains south of Egypt during the summer, and before the dam they caused the waters of the Nile to rise and flood low-lying land until they cease in September and the waters recede, leaving life-giving fertile soils behind.
The dominance of the great river in Egyptian life, unsurprisingly, found its way into the heart of their religious tradition. The sky was seen as a vast ocean across which the gods journeyed in boats. Egyptian creation stories speak of an infinite primordial ocean out of which a single mound of earth arose. A lotus blossom emerged from this mound and gave birth to the Sun. In this tradition, each of the primordial elements is associated with a god. The original mound of earth is the god Tatenen, meaning ‘risen land’ (he also represented the fertile land that emerged from the Nile floods), while the lotus flower is the god Nefertem, the god of perfumes. Most important is the Sun God, born of the lotus blossom, who took on many forms but remained central to Egyptian religious thought for over 3,000 years. It was the Sun God who brought light to the cosmos, and with light came all of creation.
The power of the supreme god Amun-Re is felt everywhere at Karnak. Representations of him cover the walls; the carvings mostly depict him as human with a double-plumed crown of feathers alongside the Pharoah, but also in animal form as a ram.
The location and alignment of this impressive building, like everything else about it, has meaning. Egyptologists have evidence to support their belief that it was constructed as a sort of calendar; two columns frame the light of the sun as it rises on the winter solstice.
At Karnak, the Sun God reigns supreme as Amun-Re, a merger between the god Amun, the local deity of Thebes, and the ancient Sun God, Re. This tendency to merge gods is widespread in Egyptian mythology, and with the mergers comes increasing theological complexity. Amun can be seen as the hidden aspect of the Sun, sometimes associated with his voyage through the Underworld during the night. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Amun is referred to as the ‘eldest of the gods of the eastern sky’, symbolising his emergence as the solar deity at sunrise. As Amun-Re, he became the King of the Gods, and as Zeus-Ammon he survived into Greek and Roman times. Worship of Amun-Re as the supreme god became so widespread that the Egyptian religion became almost monotheistic during the New Kingdom. Amun-Re was said to exist in all things, and it was believed that he transcended the boundaries of space and time to be all-seeing and eternal. In this sense, he could be seen as a precursor to the gods of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions.
The walls of Karnak Temple are literally covered with representations of Amun-Re, usually depicted in human form with a double-plumed crown of feathers – the precise meaning of which is unknown. He is most often seen with the Pharaoh, but he also appears at Karnak in animal form, as a ram.
The most spectacular tribute of all to Amun-Re, though, lies in Karnak’s orientation to the wider Universe. The Great Hypostyle Hall, the dominant feature of the temple, is aligned such that on 21 December, the winter solstice and shortest day in the Northern Hemisphere, the disc of the Sun rises between the great pillars and floods the space with light, which comes from a position directly over a small building inside which Amun-Re himself was thought to reside. Standing beside the towering stone columns watching the solstice sunrise is a powerful experience. It connects you directly with the names of the great pharaohs of ancient Egypt, because Amenophis III, Tutankhamen and Rameses II would have stood there to greet the rising December sun over three millennia ago.
The Sun rises at a different place on the horizon each morning because the Earth’s axis is tilted at 23.5 degrees to the plane of its orbit. This means that in winter in the Northern Hemisphere the Earth’s North Pole is tilted away from the Sun and the Sun stays low in the sky. As Earth moves around the Sun, the North Pole gradually tilts towards the Sun and the Sun takes a higher daily arc across the sky until midsummer, when it reaches its highest point. This gradual tilting back and forth throughout the year means that the point at which the Sun rises on the eastern horizon also moves each day. If you stand facing east, the most southerly rising point occurs at the winter solstice. The sunrise then gradually drifts northwards until it reaches its most northerly point at the summer solstice. The ancients wouldn’t have known the reason for this, of course, but they would have observed that at the solstices the sunrise point stops along the horizon for a few days, then reverses its path and drifts in the other direction. The solstices would have been unique times of year and important for a civilisation that revered the Sun as a god.
Standing in Karnak Temple watching the sunrise on this special midwinter day the alignment is obvious, but proving that ancient sites are aligned with events in the sky is difficult and controversial. This is because a temple the size of Karnak will always be aligned with something in the sky, simply because it has buildings that point in all directions! However, a key piece of evidence that convinced most Egyptologists that Karnak’s solstice alignment was intentional concerns the two columns on either side of the building in which Amun-Re resides – one to the left and one to the right when facing the rising Sun. These columns are delicately carved, and it is the inscriptions that suggest the sunrise alignment is deliberate. The left-hand column has an image of the Pharaoh embracing Amun-Re, and on one face are three carved papyrus stems – a plant that only grows along the northern reaches of the Nile. The right-hand column is similar in design, except the Pharaoh embraces Amun-Re wearing the crown of upper Egypt, which is south of Karnak. The three carved stems on this column are lotus blossoms, which only grow to the south.
It seems clear therefore that the columns are positioned and decorated to mark the compass directions around the temple, which is persuasive evidence that the heart of this building is aligned to capture the light from an important celestial event – the rising of the Sun in midwinter. It is a colossal representation of the details of our planet’s orientation and orbit around our nearby star.
The temple represents the fascination of the ancient Egyptians with the movement of the lights they saw in the sky. Their instinct to venerate them was pre-scientific, but the building also appears to enshrine a deepening awareness of the geometry of the cosmos. By observing the varying position of sunrise, an understanding of the Earth’s cycles and seasons developed, which provided essential information for planting and harvesting crops at optimum times. The development of more advanced agricultural techniques made civilisations more prosperous, ultimately giving them more time for thought, philosophy, mathematics and science. So astronomy began a virtuous cycle through which the quest to understand the heavens and their meaning lead to practical and intellectual riches beyond the imagination of the ancients.
The step from observing the regularity in the movement of the heavenly lights to modern science took much of recorded human history. The ancient Greeks began the work, but the correct description of the motion of the Sun, Moon and planets across the sky was discovered in the seventeenth century by Johannes Kepler. Removing the veil of the divine to reveal the true beauty of the cosmos was a difficult process, but the rewards that stem from that innate human fascination with the lights in the sky have proved
