May 1, 1888.] 



♦ KNO>A/^I.EDGE ♦ 



145 



^ILLUSTRATED JIAGAZINE ^ 



ffi£NC£,l!TEMTUIlE,& ART_ 



LONDON: MAY 1, 1888. 



THE STAR STOR^ OF THE FLOOD. 



HAVE made what appears to me an interesting 

 discoveiy. In drawing the star-maps, which 

 appear in Knowledge for March and April, 

 I have lighted on peculiarities which have a 

 singular bearing on an ancient record of a 

 universal deluge long regarded as full of 

 difficulties. A series of coincidences which 

 are very strange indeed if they are merely accidental, points, 

 apparently, in the clearest way to an interpretation w-hich 

 is not indeed absolutely new (were it so I might find the 

 evidence less striking), but for which certainly there has 

 hitherto been no such evidence as that which I am about to 

 suggest. 



I have had occasion of late, in dealing with the opening 

 chapters of a book on Astronomy (now nearly a quarter of 

 a centui-y in preparation), to consider the aspect of the 

 stellar heavens as seen by Babylonian and Egyptian 

 astronomers. So far as I know, no modern student of astro- 

 nomy has been at tlie p:iins to pictui'e the starry skies as 

 they appeared at particular long-past epochs in the history 

 of astronomy. Here and there cases have occurred where 

 some special star or constellation has been set back (as it 

 were) so many thousands of years, in order to ascertain 

 what position it had in the days of Ptolemy or Hipparchus, 

 or, farther back still, in the time — some 2200 years B.C. — 

 to which the buikling of the Pyramids of Egypt was first 

 assigned by those who regard the descending passage as a 

 polar pointer, or yet further back to that time — about 3-400 

 years B.C. — when the same star was in view down that 

 descending passage, and when, according to Egyptologists, 

 the dynasty of the Pyramid builders held sway over the 

 land of Egypt. I have myself, accepting that remoter date 

 as unquestionably the true era of Cheops, Chephren, and the 

 rest of the Pyramid builders, noticed many details of 

 interest in the stellar skies of those da)'s. I find, for 

 example, that the ascending passage and the great gallery 

 within the Pyramid, besides commanding (by reflection at 

 a water surface) the pole-star of the period, bore directly on 

 the star Alpha (Jentauri, remarkable as the nearest of all 

 our sun's fellows in the star depths. The long trenches dug 

 outside the eastern edge of the Pyramid's base (and called 

 by Professor Smyth the azimuth trenches) bore on the bright 

 stars Arcturus and C'apella at their rising, and were doubt- 

 less associated with the observation of the rising of these 

 stars, so as to be visible just before sunrise — a relation called 

 the heliacal rising of these first-magnitude stars. The 

 Pleiades were at that time exactly on the equator, a much 

 more critical and interesting feature than Professor Smyth 

 had looked for when he sought a date near the year 2200 B.C., 

 and selected one which put the Pleiades on the meridian 

 passing through the sun's place at the spring equinox — for 

 the equator is of all the circles on the celestial sphere the 

 most easily recognised and the most obviously interesting. 



But while I had noticed many such points as these, and 

 had indeed been much attracted by their study, I had not 

 been able to find time for what I had long intended — the 

 construction of maps which should show tlie whole of the 

 starry heavens a.s they would have appeared at or about tliat 

 critical time when the astronomy of the ancient Babylonians 

 and Egyptians (as distinguished from the modern Nebuchad- 

 nezzars, Pharaohs, and the rest) reached its culmination. 

 No astronomer who studies carefully wh.at is known about 

 ancient astronomy, can fail to recognise in the astronomy 

 of the later Chaldeans the signs of decadence and degenera- 

 tion. Nor can we wonder that it is .so. Clearly in tiie 

 days of the earlier kingdoms of Babylon and Egypt, 

 astronomy had been regarded as full of material promise. 

 A 11 the ancient astronomers wei'O astrologers : it was the 

 astrological aspect of astronomy alone which had invited 

 them to the laborious and expensive works by which they 

 had hoped to force from the skies the secret of the stars, 

 and to give to their ruling dynasties the power not only of 

 reading but of ruling the celestial orbs. That hope had 

 been in great measure disappointed. Astronomers still 

 from time to time renewed their aspiration.s, and we find 

 records that kings and rulers put trust in the promises of 

 their astrological magi and diviners; but never again did 

 whole nations contribute as they had done in the days of 

 Cheops and Chephren, and in those of the builders of the 

 Babylonian temple of the planetary spheres, to erect 

 temple-observatories for the study of the movements 

 of the heavenly bodies. The building of the Great Pyramid 

 and (contemporaneously with it) its fellows in the Ghizeli 

 plains, marked the time when astrological astronomy reached 

 its highest j)liase of development. It was at once the 

 science and the religion of the great Eastern nations of 

 those days. Cities were built to the sun and moon. All 

 the works of human life, fiom the day when the babe's 

 nativity was cast to the time when the body was to be 

 committed to the tomb, were regulated by the movements of 

 the heavenly bodies, whose influences as deities were 

 sujiposed potent over all transactions from the most trivial 

 to the mo.st important. 



When leisure, or rather the course of my literary labours, 

 gave me the opportunity to construct a planisphere' of the 

 ancient skies, I took for my epoch 3400 years b.c, because 

 while that accorded well witli the date assigned by 

 Egyptologists to the reign of Cheops, it brought the pole- 

 star. Alpha Draconis, or Thuban, into the direction aimed 

 at by the long descending passage, cut (some four feet 

 squai'e) into the solid rock below the Pyramid, and con- 

 tinued right through the massive stonework to a total 

 distance of more than a Jiundred yards. It has always 

 seemed to me preposterous to question the astronomical 

 significance of this ])olar pointer. One might as reasonably 

 question the astronomical use of the monster sundials and 

 other shadow-throwing structures in Delhi, Benares, &c. — 

 as, indeed, non-astronomical persons would most certainly 

 do if we did not chance to have records of the objects with 

 which these masses of stonework were .set up, and of the 

 astronomical uses to which they were applied. The men of 

 the Pyramid times may not have made such advances in 

 science as the men of our own day, but they were not 

 wanting in sense. We may be sure they did not make 

 these obviou.sly astronomical passages and galleries merely 

 to symbolise imperfectly for after ages such knowledge as 

 they possessed, but with a very definite purpose. We may 

 confidently accept as obvious the theory, first advanced by 

 Sir John Herschel, that that long passage was a polar 

 pointer, the longest and most massively constructed ever 

 m.ade by man. We can have no doubt that Thuban, the 

 mid star of the Dragon, was the pole-star towards which it 



