| Sothic Cycle |
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| ancient egyptian society | |
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This cycle is based on the assumption that the ancient Egyptian year was not only 365 days long, but did not have any intercalary days added to keep it in alignment with the Sothic year. The Sothic year is a kind of Sidereal Year . Normally, a sidereal year is considered to be 365.25636 days long, but that only applies to stars on the Ecliptic , or the apparent path of the Sun . Because Sirius is not on the ecliptic, the wobbling of the celestial equator and hence of the horizon at the latitude of Egypt causes the Sothic year to be slightly smaller. Indeed, it is almost exactly 365.25 days long, the average number of days in a Julian year. This cycle was first noticed by Eduard Meyer in 1904, who then carefully combed the known Egyptian inscriptions and written materials to find any mention of the calendar date when Sirius rose. He found six of them, on which the dates of much of the conventional chronology are based, one of which is believed to date to the 7th year of Senusret III . Meyer concluded that the Egyptian civil calendar was created in 4121 BC , a date that appears in a number of old books. But research and discoveries have since shown that the First Dynasty Of Egypt did not begin before c. 3100 BC , and the claim that 4121 BC is the "earliest fixed date" has been since discredited. A number of criticisms have been levelled against the reliablity of dating by the Sothic cycle. Some are serious enough to warrant consideration (for example, was the civil year unchanged through the thousands of years of Egyptian history?), while others are not (for example, there is no explicit mention of the Sothic cycle in ancient Egyptian writing). |
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