Sir Norman Lockyer

“ The instinctive love of beauty would do the rest, and make it a sine quâ non that the rosy-fingered dawn should be observable, and that the coloured light of the rising sun in the more boreal clime should render glorious a stately statue of the divinity. ”

“ Now, there can be little doubt that in the darkened sanctuary of an Egyptian temple the light of α Lyræ, one of the brightest stars in the northern heavens, rising in the clear air of Egypt, would be quite strong enough to throw into an apparent glow such highly-reflecting surfaces as those to which Herodotus refers. ”

“ It is perfectly clear that if we have a means of calculating back the old positions of stars, and if we have any very old observations, we can help matters very much, because the old observations—if they were accurately made—would tell us that such and such a star rose with the sun at the solstice 129 or at the equinox at some special point of ancient time. If it be possible to calculate the time at which the star occupied that position with regard to the sun, we have an astronomical means of determining the time, within a few years, at which that particular observation was made. ”

“ Every celestial body, whether we deal with the sun, moon, planet, or star, occupies at any moment a certain place in the sky, partly, though not wholly, defined by what we term its declination, i.e., its distance from the celestial equator. This declination is one of the two co-ordinates which are essential for enabling us to state accurately the position of any body on the celestial vault; and we must quite understand that if all these bodies rise and set, and rise and set visibly, the place of their rising or setting must be very closely connected with their declination. ”

“ If my suggestion be admitted that the Babylonians dealt not with the daily fight but with the yearly fight between light and darkness—that is, the antithesis between day and night was expanded into the antithesis between the summer and the winter halves of the year—then it is clear that at the vernal equinox Scorpio setting in the west would be watching the sunrise; at the autumnal equinox rising in the east, it would be watching the sunset; one part would be visible in the sky, the other would be below the horizon in the celestial waters. ”

“ We cannot make a statement regarding every particular temple with absolute certainty, for the reason that in the case of most of the temples the best Egyptologists cannot give us the most precious piece of information which we require from the astronomical point of view—that is, the date of the foundation of the temple. If in the case of these temples it were absolutely certain that each temple was built at a certain time with a certain orientation, we could tell at once whether or not that temple was pointed to any particular star. ”

“ I assume the personification or the deification of the sun: I shall subsequently have to include the stars; I indicate special orientations of buildings devoted to the worship of the sun at one time of the year or another. But really both these things, though they seem improbable, have been carried down to our own day, quite independently of any question relating to Egypt. There is nothing new about them at all, and there is nothing really strange. When we go into an observatory we think nothing of turning our telescope towards Venus, or Jupiter, or Mars. ”

“ This generic symbolism suggests that the names Isis and Hathor are themselves generalisations, meaning an accompaniment of sunrise, whether that light be the dawn, or an heliacally-rising star, or even the moon. The generic symbol is the sun's disk and horns, which, I think, may not impossibly be a poetic development of the sign for sunrise. Isis and Hathor are two different ways of defining or thinking about a rising star—that is, a star heralding the sunrise, for such were the rising stars par excellence. ”

“ If a star was chosen in or near the ecliptic, sooner or later the sunlight as well as the starlight would enter the temple, and the use of a solar temple might have thus been suggested even before the solstices or equinoxes had been thoroughly grasped.
There is no doubt that if we are justified in assuming that the stars were first observed, the next thing that would strike the early astronomers would be the regularity of the annual movement of the sun; the critical times of the sun's movements as related either to their agriculture, or their festivals, or to the year ”

“ It looks as if rough determinations of star places were made at about the same time in Egypt and Babylonia.
This abstract inquiry is now practically the only source of interest in astronomy to us; we no longer worship the sun; we no longer believe in astrology; we have our calendar; but we must have a Nautical Almanac calculated years beforehand, and some of us like to know a little about the universe which surrounds us. ”

“ If we take first the points at which the axis, instead of being inclined towards the sun, is inclined at right angles to it, it is perfectly obvious that we shall get a condition of things in which the movement of the earth on its axis will cause the dark side of the earth and also the light side represented by the side nearest to the sun, both being of equal areas, to extend from pole to pole; so that any place on the earth rotating under those conditions will be brought for half a period of rotation into the sunlight, and be carried for half a period of the rotation out of the sunlight ”

“ The Euphrates and Tigris rise at the Spring Equinox—the religion was equinoxial, the temples were directed to the east. The Nile rises at a solstice—the religion was solstitial and the solar temples were directed no longer to the east. To the Egyptians the coming of the river to the parched land was as the sunrise chasing the darkness of the night; the sun-god of day conquering the star-gods of night ”

“ We have already defined distance from the equator as north or south declination in the case of a star, as we have north latitude or south latitude in case of a place on the earth. With regard to the other co-ordinate, we can also say that the heavenly body whose place we are anxious to determine is at a certain distance from our first point of measurement, whatever that may be, along the celestial equator. Speaking of heavenly bodies, we call this distance right ascension; dealing with matters earthy, we measure from the meridian of Greenwich and call the distance longitude. ”

“ It is perfectly true that this religious treatment of the planets is not of our own day: we have inherited it from the Greeks through the Latins; but we do not think it at all extraordinary that a planet should be called Venus or Jupiter. Thus we of to-day are completely in touch with the old Egyptians, except that the Egyptians were wiser in their generation, and looked after the sun at fixed points in the year and the constant stars instead of the variable planets. ”

“ No star would either rise or set—one half of the heavens would be always visible above his horizon, and the other half invisible; whereas an observer at the South Pole would see that half of the stars invisible to the observer at the northern one, because it was the half below the N. horizon. If the observer be on the equator, the movements of the stars all appear as indicated in the above diagram—that is, all the stars will rise and set, and each star in turn will be half its time above the horizon, and half its time below it. ”

“ Knowing that the earth moves round the sun once a year, the year to us moderns is defined with the most absolute accuracy. In fact, we have three years: we have a sidereal year—that is, the time taken by the earth to go through exactly 360° of longitude; we have what is called the tropical year, which indicates the time taken by the earth to go through not quite 360°, to go from the first point of Aries till she meets it again; and since the equinoctial point advances to meet the earth, we talk about the precession of the equinoxes ”

“ It would be very surprising, if we assume, as we are bound to do, that these temples to stars were built under Egyptian influence, that Sirius should not be represented among them, that being the paramount star in Egypt at a time when we should expect to find her influence most important in Greece. Still, I have shown already that, as the Greek year ignored the solstice, the use of Sirius as a warning star for all purposes of utility would not come in. Mr. Penrose finds, however, that, in spite of this, Sirius was used for temple-worship. ”