We in the modern world consider the Year Zero of our calendar to be the presumed birth of Jesus, which, today, is thought to have been 2,010 years ago. This, however, is purely an arbitrary date. Indeed many other people—such as the Muslims, the Jews, the Chinese, and the Japanese—had (and some still have) other Year Zeroes for their own calendars. Usually, years are numbered from the date of a historical person, either an ancient person, as in the case of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian calendars, or a sequence of emperors, as in ancient China or modern Japan, where legal documents are dated “year Heisei 22.” When was the Year Zero of the ancient Egyptians? How can we calculate its date? This is where we can note an interesting issue regarding study of the drift of the civil calendar relative to the heliacal rising of Sirius…

…at the reception area at Saqqara, Imhotep is given a place of honor, and there are several statues representing this Leonardo da Vinci of the ancient world. His name, titles, and functions are attested on the pedestal of a statue of King Djoser. As we have seen, it seems certain that a calendar based on the heliacal rising of Sirius was used since earliest time in Egypt and was referred to sometimes as the Sothic calendar. It also seems certain that this calendar was eventually formally adopted by the Heliopolitan priests, who pinned it to their own newly devised civil calendar, when a Sothic cycle was made to begin with the New Year’s Day of 1 Thoth. It is thus quite possible that it was Imhotep who introduced the Sothic calendar based on the cycles of Sirius, or, as we now strongly suspect, merely formalized it from an earlier calendar that was already in place with the prehistoric star people of Nabta Playa. At any rate, much evidence supports the view that a Sothic calendar ran parallel to a civil calendar so that they both resynchronized every 1,460 years—that is, every Sothic cycle. According to the science historian

Gerald J. Whitrow, “there is reason to associate this with the minister of king Djoser of the Third Dynasty known as Imhotep.” Bearing this in mind and also recalling that Imhotep was the architect of the very first pyramid complex in Egypt, we would expect to find some indication of the Sothic cycle in the design of his masterpiece, the step pyramid complex at Saqqara…