THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 125 



three hundred and sixty-five days, if the sun, at the commencement 

 of one, was at the commencement of a constellation, he would be six 

 hours backward at the same time in the commencement of the fol- 

 lowing year, and after one hundred and twenty-one years he would 

 have retrogaded to the commencement of the preceding sign. 



It seems probable enough that the builders of a temple would have 

 wished to indicate as nearly as possible in what period of the great 

 year, or sothaic year, it was erected, and the indication of the sign 

 which then commenced the sacred year was the best possible means 

 of effecting this. We should thus find that one hundred and twenty 

 or one hundred and fifty years had elapsed between the building of 

 the temple at Esne, and that at Dendera. 



But, by this view of the case, it still remained to be determined in 

 which of the great years these erections took place ; in that which 

 finished one hundred and thirty-eight years after ; or in that which 

 terminated 1322 years before Christ, or in some other. 



Visconti, the author of this hypothesis, taking the sacred year, 

 whose commencement corresponded with the sign of Leo, and judging, 

 from the similarity of these signs, that they had been represented at 

 an epoch when the opinions of the Greeks were not unknown in 

 Egypt, could only choose the end of the last great year, or the space 

 that elapsed between the year twelve, and the year one hundred and 

 thirty-eight after Christ *, which seemed to him to agree with the 

 Greek inscription, of which, however, he knew but little, but had heard 

 that it made some mention of one of the Caesars. 



M. Testa, seeking the dates of the monument by another train of 

 reasoning, supposed, that as Virgo is at Esne at the head of the zodiac, 

 it was intended to depict the era of the battle of Actium, as it was 

 established in Egypt, by a decree of the senate, cited by Dion Cassius, 

 and which began in the month of September, or the day on which 

 Augustus took Alexandria f. 



M. de Paravey considered these zodiacs in a novel point of view, 

 which embraces at once both the revolution of the equinoxes, and 

 those of the great year. Supposing that the circular planisphere of 

 Dendera must have been placed towards the east, and that the axis 

 from north to south is the line of the solstices, he found the summer 

 solstice at the second of Gemini ; that of the winter solstice at the 

 tail of Sagittarius ; and the line of the equinoxes would have passed 



* Translatioa of Herodotus, by Larcher, v. ii, p. 570. 



f Seethe dissertation of the Abb^ Dominique Testa. " Sopra due Zodiaci uo- 

 vellamente scoperte nell' Egitto." Rome, 1802, p. 34. 



