Black Genesis (cont.)
By Robert Bauval & Thomas Brophy
From Chapter I, section
In Comes Archaeoastronomy:
…In the past forty
years or so there has been a growing interest in the
new scientific field of archaeoastronomy, which,
according to one school
of thought, is defined as the study of the
astronomies, astrologies, and
cosmologies, as well as the alignments of
monuments and buildings of
ancient cultures. ..
… A sort of
stillborn precursor of modern archaeoastronomy can be found in the
turbulent intellectual milieu that swirled through the French
intelligentsia at the turn of the nineteenth century after Napoleon,
in 1799, took a cadre of top scientists and scholars along with his
army on their adventurous military campaigns through Egypt. Napoleon
also took along artists to record the journeys in sketches. One such
artist, Vivant Denon, was fascinated by a zodiac sculpted onto the
ceiling of a temple at Dendera. In Paris, Denon published as a book
his sketch of the Dendera zodiac along with an account of his
travels, and it became a huge bestseller in both France and England.
In the important scientific and scholarly societies of Paris there
arose a protracted and very active debate focusing on attempts to
date the Dendera zodiac. One camp was composed of scientific
luminaries of the time, many of whose names are familiar to any
student of science today. These scientists often gathered at the home
of the Marquis de LaPlace. Particularly active in the Dendera zodiac
debate were physicists Jean-Baptiste Biot and Joseph Fourier,
astronomer Johan Karl Burckhardt, and his engineer partner
Jean-Baptiste Coraboeuf. The approach that all in this camp followed
in order to attempt to date the zodiac was to match calculations of
the astronomical precession of the equinoxes with the images of
constellations on the Dendera zodiac. They followed the reasoning of
pre–French Revolutionary scholar Charles Dupuis, who had based
his study of the origins of religion on interpreting religious
mythologies in astronomical terms….
… Stirring even
more the turbulence of the debate was that many French intellectuals,
such as Dupuis, had little use for biblical fundamentalism, while
others believed all scholarship should be firmly based on
interpreting biblical Mosaic (emphasizing the Books of Moses)
chronology. One of these was the young Jean-Francois Champollion.
Meanwhile, a French
antiquities collector named Saulnier had dispatched a master
stonemason named Lelorrain on an expedition to Dendera to steal the
zodiac. After using stone saws and chisels and finally dynamite,
Lelorrain managed to cart the remains of the temple ceiling back to
Paris. These remains, however, did not include the parts of the
ceiling that ended up winning the Dendera zodiac debates. In
September 1822, Champollion, after years of poverty-stricken
excruciating efforts,9 finally
cracked the code for how to decipher hieroglyphs. Champollion first
deciphered the cartouches that contain royal names. (A cartouche is
an oval enclosure in which the name of a pharaoh is inscribed. Only a
king’s name can be written within a cartouche.)
Among the first
cartouches he deciphered were those next to the Dendera zodiac. There
he read the ancient Greek word for “ruler,” thus dating
the construction of the zodiac ceiling to the Ptolemaic period and
winning the debate for the side of the philologists, who could
happily boot the physicists and astronomers out of the circle of
those considered able to offer legitimate authority about antiquity.
Yet in what must be one
of the great ironies of history, in 1828, when Champollion had the
resources finally to mount his own expedition and he arrived at
Dendera to see his famous cartouches, he was horrified to find them
empty. They never had contained any hieroglyphs, no royal names at
all…
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