●ナブタ・プラヤ発見の経緯 Ⅰ 戻る
"Holocene Settlement of the Egyptian Sahara: The Archaeology of Nabta
Playa"
Fred Wendorf, Romuald Schild, Kit Nelson 著 (2001年11月1日刊)
Introductionから
"Our first experience at
Nabta Playa was in 1973, following a long field season excavating Lower and
Middle Paleolithic sites at Bir Sahara, about 300 km west of Nabta. We were on
our way home, travelling in a small convoy of vehicles toward Abu Simbel,
navigating by compass because there were no roads. We happened to make a rest
stop at Nabta Playa where we noted numerous artifacts at our feet. By chance, we
had stopped at one of the most important localities in the basin, one that is
now known as Site E-75-6. A brief survey located many other sites in the basin,
and we decided to investigate the area further during the following field
season."
●ナブタ・プラヤ発見の経緯 Ⅱ
"Black Genesis : The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt"
Robert Bauval、Thomas G. Brophy 著 (2011年3月28日刊)
9ページから
"Barely a year later,however,in 1973,after Wendorf's fateful pee break
100 kilometers from Abu Simbel, and after they walked around the large,
shallow basin and saw all the strange stone clusters and protracted alignments
as well as a plethora of tumuli and potsherds strewn all over the ground,
both men started to suspect that just maybe they had hit the anthropological
jackpot―for this was no ordinary prehistoric site. It was a sort of unique
Stone Age theme park in which mysterious events and occult ceremonies quite
obviously took Place. The local modern Bedouins called the region Nabta,which
apparently meant "seeds." Borrowing this name and concluding
that the wide, sandy-clay basin they stood on in the desert was the bottom
of a very ancient lake, Wendorf and Schild christened the site Nabta Playa."
●南西エジプト、ナブタ・プラヤの後期新石器時代の巨石構造物(サハラ砂漠) 戻る
"Late Neolithic megalithic structures at Nabta Playa (Sahara), southwestern Egypt."
By Fred Wendorf , Romuald Schild
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction
Located 100 km west of Abu Simbel, in southernmost Egypt, Nabta Playa is a large, internally drained basin, which during the early Holocene ( ca. 11,000 - 5500 calibrated radiocarbon years ago) was a large and important ceremonial center for prehistoric people. It was intermittently and seasonally filled with water, which encouraged people to come there, and today it contains dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of archaeological sites. People came from many regions to Nabta Playa to record astronomical events, erect alignments of megaliths, and build impressive stone structures.
From around 65,000 years ago until about 12,000 years ago the Western Desert was hyper-arid, at least as dry as today and perhaps drier. This began to change after 12,000 years ago when the summer rains of tropical Africa began to move northward, bringing sufficient moisture for a wide variety of sahelian grasses, trees and bushes to grow, and for a few small animals to exist, mostly hares and small gazelle, but also including a few small carnivores. Even with the rains it was still very dry; the annual rainfall was no more than 100 - 150 mm per year, and it was unpredictable and punctuated with numerous droughts, some of which caused the desert to be abandoned for lengthy periods. The earliest (11,000 - 9300 years ago, calibrated) settlements at Nabta were composed of small seasonal camps of cattle-herding and ceramic-using people. These early cattle are regarded as domestic (Wendorf and Schild 1994), and it may have been in the Western Desert that the African pattern of cattle herding developed, wherein cattle serve as a "walking larder" and provide milk and blood, rather than meat (except for ceremonial occasions) and are the economic basis for power and prestige. Pottery is very rare in these sites, but distinctive. It is decorated over the entire exterior with complex patterns of impressions applied with a comb in a rocking motion. The source of this pottery has not been identified, but it is among the oldest known in Africa, and older than pottery in Southwest Asia. These early people probably came into the desert after the summer rains from either farther south or the adjacent Nile Valley, in either case searching for pasture for their cattle. Each fall, when the surface water in the playas dried up and there was no water for them or their cattle, they had to return to the Nile, or perhaps to the better watered areas to the south.
By 9000 years ago (8000 bp, uncalibrated), the settlements were much larger, and their inhabitants were able to live in the desert year-round, digging large, deep wells and living in organized villages consisting of small huts arranged in straight lines. The many plant remains in these sites tell us they were collecting large numbers of edible wild plants, including sorghum, millets, legumes, tubers, and fruits. Around 8800 years ago (7800 bp, uncalibrated), they began to make pottery locally, possibly the earliest pottery in Egypt. A few hundred years later, around 8100 years ago (7100 bp, uncalibrated), sheep and goats occur for the first time at Nabta, almost certainly introduced from Southwest Asia, where domestic caprovids had been known for over 2000 years. There must have been many changes in the settlement system to accommodate these new animals; the settlements are very large and contain numerous hearths, but there is no evidence of huts or houses.
A major change occurred in the character of the Neolithic society at Nabta occurred around 7500 years ago, following a major drought which drove the previous groups from the desert. The groups who returned to the desert now clearly had a complex social system that expressed a degree of organization and control not previously seen in Egypt. They sacrificed young cows and buried them in clay-lined and roofed chambers covered by rough stone tumuli, they erected alignments of large, unshaped stones, they built Egypt's earliest astronomical measuring device (a "calendar circle" which appears to have been used to mark the summer solstice), and they constructed more than 30 complex structures having both surface and subterranean features. A shaped stone from one of these complexes may be the oldest known sculpture in Egypt.
These structures are important because they indicate the way the people were able to organize work, celebrate their culture, and perhaps express their religious beliefs, and furthermore, they tell us that the Saharan people may have been more highly organized than their contemporaries in the Nile Valley.
Nabta: A Regional Ceremonial Center
A regional ceremonial center is a place where related but widely separated groups gather periodically to conduct ceremonies and to reaffirm their social and political solidarity. Even today in many parts of Africa these centers serve as foci of religious, political and social functions for the entire group. Nabta seems to have been such a center for pastoralists living in the southwestern portion of the Egyptian Western Desert. It probably began to function as a regional ceremonial center during the Middle Neolithic (8100-7600 years ago), when groups residing in other nearby basins gathered there for ceremonial and other purposes during the summer wet season when the playa was at its largest extent. This gathering occurred on a dune along the northwestern shore of the playa where there are hundreds of hearths and more than two meters of accumulated cultural debris.
Among the more interesting elements in the cultural debris at this gathering site were numerous bones of cattle. While present in most sites, bones of cattle are elsewhere never very numerous, good evidence that they were kept primarily for their milk and blood, rather than for meat. This pattern resembles the role of cattle among modern African pastoralists, where cattle represent wealth and political power and are rarely killed except on important ceremonial or social occasions, such as the death of a leader or a marriage. This so-called "African Cattle Complex" may have begun in the Western Desert of Egypt.
The role of Nabta as a regional ceremonial center is also indicated by a north-south alignment of nine large (average, 3 x 2 x 0.5 m) quartzitic sandstone slabs set upright about 100 m apart, and partially imbedded in playa sediments near the gathering area along the northwest margin of the seasonal lake. The blocks were unshaped, and many of them are now broken; however, they can be refitted. Outcrops of similar sandstone occur in the vicinity, some less than a kilometer from the alignment. The alignment cannot be dated precisely, but it is probably Late Neolithic in age, and if so it was erected between 7500 and 5500 years ago. It is similar to the large stone alignments found in Western Europe, where they are dated to the late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, about the same age as the Nabta alignment. There are other alignments known farther south in both East and West Africa, but they are thought to date much later, to the Iron Age.
About 300 m beyond the north end of the Nabta alignment is a "calendar circle" consisting of a series of small sandstone slabs arranged in a circle about 4 m in diameter. Among the ring of stones are four pairs of larger stones, each pair set close together and separated by a narrow space, or gate. The gates on two of these pairs align generally north-south; the gates on the other two pairs form a line at 700 east of north, which aligns with the calculated position of sunrise at the summer solstice 6000 years ago. In the center of the circle are six upright slabs arranged in two lines , whose astronomical function, if any, is not evident. Charcoal from one of the numerous hearths around the "calendar" dated around 6800 years ago (6000 bp +- 60 years, CAMS - 17287).
Another 300 meters farther north of the calendar circle is a stone-covered tumulus containing the remains of a complete articulated young adult cow buried in a chamber that was dug into the floor of the wadi, surrounded by a clay collar, and roofed with limbs of tamarisk. The chamber was then covered with broken rocks forming a mound 8 meters in diameter and a meter high. A piece of wood from the roof yielded a calibrated radiocarbon date between 7400 and 7300 years ago (6470 bp +- 270 years, CAMS - 17289). In the same area seven other similar stone tumuli containing the remains of cattle were excavated, but none of them had subsurface chambers; instead, the bones of the cattle, a few of which were still articulated, were simply placed among the stones.
Among the most interesting features at Nabta is the group of thirty "complex
structures" located in an area about 500 meters long and 200 meters
wide, on a high remnant of playa clays and silts about a kilometer south
of the large settlement which yielded so many bones of cattle. Each of
these structures consists of a group of large, elongated, roughly shaped
or unshaped sandstone blocks set upright to frame an oval area about five
meters in length and four meters in width, oriented slightly west of north.
In the center of this oval there is one, sometimes two, very large flat
slabs laid horizontally.
Two of these structures have been excavated, a third has been tested, and
drill-holes have been dug at two others. All are basically similar, although
they differ in some details. All of the excavated and tested structures
were built over mushroom-shaped tablerocks, the tops of which were deeply
buried (from two to three and a half meters below the surface) in heavy
playa clays and silts. These tablerocks are quartzitic lenses in the underlying
bedrock which were shaped by erosion of the softer surrounding sediments
before the overlying playa sediments were deposited. How the Nabta people
managed to find these tablerocks deeply buried below the surface is not
clear, but it may have been mere chance and occurred during the excavation
of a water well. Except for the structures, however, there is no other
archaeological material in this area, which is highly unusual for the Nabta
Basin, where archaeological sites of various ages occur almost everywhere.
The excavation of the largest of these complex structures disclosed that before the upright stones were erected, a large pit about six meters in diameter and four meters deep had been dug. The table rock at the base of the pit was shaped by removing the irregular edges, leaving a convex perimeter on three sides. The fourth side, at the north end, was worked by flaking to form a straight edge. The top of the table rock was also smoothed. The pit was then partially refilled with playa clay to a level about a half meter above the top of the table rock, and then an enormous (ca. 2.5 tons), carefully shaped stone was brought in and held in position by several small slabs. The base of the shaped stone was 2.5 meters below the surface. What this "sculpture" represents is not clear; it is shaped on only two sides, and its sculptors used the natural bedding in the rock to achieve a wide, curved surface which they smoothed. In some views the stone vaguely resembles a large animal. After the shaped stone was placed in position, the pit was backfilled completely, and the surface architecture of large upright stones and two large horizontal central stones was erected directly over the tablerock.
The other excavated structure also had been erected over a tablerock, and it too had a large stone over the tablerock, but work on that stone was limited to a few flakes removed from one end. The third complex structure was only tested. It was one of eight that were tightly clustered and interlocked together. The units were smaller, constructed of smaller stones, but had the same configuration with a large horizontal central stone. The test excavations recovered charcoal from a shelf on the edge of the pit under the structure, and this charcoal yielded a calibrated radiocarbon age between 5600 and 5400 years ago (4800 +- 80 years bp; DRI 3358). This is the only date available for these structures, and it is about 1500 years later than we had estimated from the stratigraphic evidence. This cluster differs from the other complex structures, and it may relate to a late phase in this phenomena; however, there is no other reason to reject the date.
Drilling at two other structures showed that they had also been erected over buried tablerocks. Although only two of these features were excavated completely, and a third only tested, it is highly likely that most of the others were also built over deeply buried tablerocks that may or may not have been modified, and may also have large worked stones in the fill above the tablerock. These complex structures appear to be unique to Nabta; they are not known to occur in the Nile Valley, or elsewhere in the Western Desert. It should be noted, however, that they are difficult to recognize (they were regarded a bedrock outcrops for many years), and they may be more widespread in the Eastern Sahara than now believed.
We had expected to find burials of elite individuals below the central stones, but no traces of human remains were seen, although the excavations were carried beyond the limits of the original pits dug to expose the tablerock. The function of the complex structures remains unknown, however, it may be useful to consider the implications of their presence at Nabta.
Additional Comments
The construction of the megaliths and the large complex structures at Nabta required significant effort, indicating the presence of a religious or political authority with control over human resources for an extended period of time. They, together with the calendar circle and cattle burials, represent an elaborate and previously unsuspected ceremonialism in the Neolithic of the Eastern Sahara. Although the evidence remains insecure and thus it cannot be demonstrated that these Saharan cattle pastoralists had a ranked society, this is, nevertheless, a strong possibility.
The discoveries at Nabta Playa suggest the possibility of a previously unrecognized relationship between the Neolithic people living along the Nile and pastoralists in the adjacent Sahara which may have contributed to the rise of social complexity in ancient Egypt. This complexity, as expressed by different levels of authority within the society, forms the basis for the structure of both the Neolithic society at Nabta and the Old Kingdom of Egypt. It was this authority at Nabta which made possible the planned arrangement of their villages, the excavation of large, deep wells, and the construction of complex stone structures made of large, shaped and unshaped stones. There are other Nabta features which are shared by the two areas, but which appear suddenly and without evident local antecedents in the late Predynastic and early Old Kingdom in the Nile Valley. These include the role of cattle to express differences of wealth, power and authority, the emphasis on cattle in religious beliefs, and the use of astronomical knowledge and devices to predict solar events. Many of these features have a prior and long history of development at Nabta.
The geographic position of the Nabta center is also of interest. Nabta may have been a contact point between the early Neolithic groups along the Nile who had an agricultural economy and the cattle pastoralists in the Eastern Sahara. The functional separation of these two different economies may have played a significant role in the emergence of complexity among both groups. The evidence for Nilotic influence on pastoralists is not extensive and is presently limited to ceramic technology, domestic caprovids, and the occasional trade of shells of Nile species and rare stones from the Nile gravel. However, there are many aspects of political and ceremonial life in the Predynastic and Old Kingdom that reflects a strong impact from Saharan cattle pastoralists.
The likely possibility of a symbiotic relationship between the cattle pastoralists in the Sahara and the Neolithic groups in the Nile Valley points to a potentially important role for the Nabta regional ceremonial center. Among East African cattle pastoralists regional ceremonial centers, because of their integrative role, are frequently placed near boundaries between different segments of a tribe, or between different tribal groups. The Nabta center could well have served that purpose, it could have been located between several groups of pastoralists, and between pastoralists and the Neolithic farmers along the Nile, 100 km away.
It has long been assumed that Egypt borrowed the concepts of complexity from Mesopotamia; however, it is now generally recognized that a process like social complexity cannot be diffused from one area to another, but instead develops from local causes. It might occur, for example, when there are two radically different economic systems in close physical proximity, as is found where agriculturists have close relationships with pastoralists. Pastoralists usually live in tense harmony with their village neighbors, but from time to time they will take advantage of a weakness and take control. It is in this setting that the socially complex Late Neolithic cattle pastoralists and their regional ceremonial center at Nabta is of particular importance.
There are many features in the religious beliefs and social systems of early Egyptians which are not found in Mesopotamia. Among the ancient Egyptians, cattle were the central focus of the belief system. They were deified and regarded as earthly representatives of the gods. A cow was also seen as the mother of the sun, who is sometimes referred to as the "Bull of Heaven." The Egyptian pharaoh was regarded as the embodiment of two gods, Horus, for Upper Egypt and Seth, for Lower Egypt, but he was primarily Horus, son of Hathor, who was a cow. Horus is also sometimes depicted as a strong bull, and images of cattle are prominent in Predynastic and Old Kingdom art; in some instances images of bulls occur with depiction's of stars. Another important Old Kingdom concept was Min, the god of rain, who is associated with a white bull, and to whom the annual harvest festival was dedicated.
It is significant that the emphasis on cattle in the belief system of the Old Kingdom was not reflected in the economy. While cattle were known and were the major measure of wealth, the economy was based primarily on agriculture and small livestock - sheep and goats. Also, cattle were not important among the preceding Neolithic in the Nile Valley, which suggests that the Old Kingdom belief system was imposed from the outside, perhaps in the traditional fashion, a conquest by pastoralists who periodically come in from their "lands of insolence" to conquer their farming neighbors (Coon 1958:295-323; Khazanov 1994). It is tempting to suggest that the impressive cattle burials at the A-Group site of Qustul (Williams 1986), in Egypt south of Abu Simbel, may relate to just such an event. At the moment these interesting possibilities must be regarded as speculative; the data on the structure of the Saharan pastoralist societies remains inadequate, and the character of the early Neolithic in the Nile Valley in Nubia and Upper Egypt is poorly understood, but a study of the interaction between the Sahara and the Nile may throw significant light on the processes that led to the rise of Egyptian Civilization.
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Bibliography
1,Malville, Wendorf, Mazar, and Schild
1998 NATURE 292:488-491 2 April 1998.
2,Wendorf and Schild
1998 "Nabta Playa and its role in Northeastern African Prehistory" JOUR. OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 17:97-123.
注:この原文は「http://www.comp-archaeology.org/WendorfSAA98.html」に掲載されていたものですが、2011年7月頃削除されました。上はキャッシュから復元したものです。その後(同年9月末)別のサイトに同文章が有ることを知りました。こちらとこちらです。
●ナブタ・プラヤの天文学 戻る
" Astronomy of Nabta Playa "
"African Cultural Astronomy: Current Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy Research in Africa"から
Original(PDF11.03MB:131頁)
戻る
The Astronomers of Nabta Playa
New Discoveries Reveal Astonishing Pre-Historic Knowledge
BY MARK H. GAFFNEY
According to most experts the dawn of Western civilization occurred in the fourth millennium B.C. with the sudden flowering of Sumer in southern Iraq and Pharaonic Egypt soon after. This is the mainstream view that was taught when I was a college student. Increasingly, however, it is under assault. Recent discoveries are challenging almost everything we thought we knew about human history. In 1973 a team of archaeologists made such a discovery while traveling through a remote region in southern Egypt. They were navigating by compass through a trackless waste known as the Nabta Playa and had halted for a water break, when they noticed potsherds at their feet. Fragments of old pottery frequently are an indicator of archaeological potential, and the team returned later to investigate. After several seasons of digging they eventually realized that Nabta Playa was not just another neolithic site. The breakthrough came when they discovered that what had looked like rock outcroppings were in fact standing megalithic stones.
They also found a circle of smaller stones, which in photos look like derelict rocks. Nearby, the arrangement of larger megaliths sprawls over a broad area. The wind-swept site is desolate beyond belief. But thousands of years ago this forbidding waste was a well-watered grassland and seasonally, at least, well peopled.
Today we know that the great megaliths of Nabta Playa are anything but random stones. Long ago, someone relocated them from a still unknown quarry–––but for what purpose? Subsequent excavations led by Fred Wendorf, one of the discoverers and a much traveled archaeologist, turned up an abundance of cultural artifacts, which were radiocarbon dated. The ages ranged from 10,000 B.C. to 3,000 B.C., with most of the dates clustered around 6,000 B.C., when the climate was much wetter than now. The Nabta Playa is a basin and during this epoch it filled with seasonal lakes. Excavations through the 8—12 feet of sediments laid down during this period showed that some of the megaliths had been buried intentionally. The team also found strange carvings in the bedrock under the sediments––– evidence of great antiquity.
The archaeologists mapped the area and used global positioning technology (GPS) to plot the locations of 25 individual megaliths. Many others remain to be plotted. Fortunately, the site’s remoteness protected it from most human disturbance. Though the mapping data hinted at astronomical significance, Wendorf’s team searched in vain for the key to unlock the site. In 2001 they presented their research in a book edited by Wendorf, Holocene Settlement of the Egyptian Sahara. The two-volume study makes for interesting reading. But its authors had few answers.
However, even as Wendorf’s book was in press, a former NASA physicist named Thomas Brophy was quietly pursuing his own astronomical study of Nabta Playa. Brophy had already reviewed the sparse data published in Nature in 1998, and after Wendorf’s more extensive data became available his nascent theories fell into place. In 2002 Brophy presented his findings in The Origin Map. Because the available astronomy software was inadequate Brophy had to custom-engineer his own. Thus armed, he was able to track star movements at Nabta Playa over thousands of years, and succeeded in decoding the stone circle and nearby megaliths. The Calendar Circle has a built-in meridian-line and a sight-line–––both conspicuous–––which indicated to Brophy that the circle was a user-friendly star-viewing platform. Its design was so simple that even a novice could have used it. A night viewer between 6400—4900 B.C. stood at the north end of the meridian axis and allowed himself to be guided by three stones at his feet to the constellation Orion overhead. The correspondence between ground and sky would have been self-evident: The three stones within the outer circle are laid out in the precise pattern of the stars of Orion’s famous belt, before summer solstice as indicated by the Calendar Circle itself. Once the pattern becomes familiar it is unmistakable.
In another section of his book Brophy concluded that Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert were at least partly correct in their 1992 study, The Orion Mystery, in which they claimed that Giza had a similar planned structure. Bauval and Gilbert argued that the pyramids of Giza were constructed to mirror heaven, laid out on the ground to represent these same three stars of Orion’s belt.
Here, then, at Nabta Playa, was evidence of a common astronomical tradition of astonishing longevity. Just to give you some idea, modern astronomy is about 500 years old, yet, the astronomy common to both Giza and Nabta Playa survived for at least 6,000—7,000 years, possibly longer. The shared astronomy also suggests a shared cultural tradition. In fact, Wendorf’s team amassed considerable evidence of overlap between the neolithic Nabta culture and the much later Old Kingdom of Pharaonic Egypt, when pyramid building reached its zenith. It is interesting that more than a century ago Flinders Petrie, one of the founders of Egyptology, arrived at a similar conclusion. Petrie found evidence that the enigmatic Sphinx was not an Egyptian sculptural form at all, but had originated in Ethiopia.
Brophy’s findings also support the work of geologist Robert Schoch, who recently found telltale evidence of water erosion on the Sphinx indicating that the most enigmatic sculpture on the planet dates to this same wetter epoch, or before. Schoch’s analysis flew squarely in the face of mainstream Egyptology, which continues to insist on a much later date. A confirmed link between Giza and Nabta Playa would lay to rest any doubts about the relevance of Nabta Playa because of its remoteness. Far from being disconnected from the mainstream of the emerging Egyptian cultural tradition, at one time Nabta Playa may even have been the center of it all.
While all of this is extraordinary, Brophy’s conclusions about the other nearby megalithic formation are mind numbing. Brophy thinks this other construction may be a star map, the creation of which required a knowledge of astronomy that rivaled and may even have surpassed our own. Brophy’s conclusions are highly controversial, but his work deserves close attention, because if he is correct we have barely begun to understand where we came from.
So, what do the Nabta megaliths tell us after thousands of years of silence? Their designers placed them in straight lines that radiate out from a central point. The arrangement employed a simple star-coordinate system that assigned two stones per star. One aligned with the star itself and marked its vernal equinox heliacal (i.e., rising together with the sun on the first day of spring) position on the horizon. The other aligned with a reference star, in this case Vega, thus fixing the first star’s rising at a specific date in history. In archaeoastronomy single megalithic alignments with stars are considered dubious because at any given time several stars will rise at or within a few degrees of the point on the horizon denoted by a lone marker. Over long periods of time many different stars will rise over this position. The creators of Nabta Playa eliminated uncertainty with the Vega alignment and the specificity of vernal equinox heliacal rising, which occurs only once every 26,000 years for a given star. This fixed the star’s rising date. Vega was a logical choice because it is the fifth brightest star in the heavens and dominated the northern sky in this early period. Brophy found that six of the megaliths corresponded with the six important stars in Orion (Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka, Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, and Meissa), also confirming his analysis of the nearby circle. Their placement marked the vernal heliacal rising of these stars, which occurred around 6,300 B.C., within about twenty years. The second set of reference stones were keyed to the heliacal rising of Vega, which occurred at the autumnal equinox. In the seventh millennium B.C. the Nabta plain was a busy place.
The heliacal rising of a star occurs when it rises above the horizon with the morning sun. A vernal heliacal rising describes the same event on the day of the spring equinox, which is much rarer. Using a conservative statistical protocol, Brophy calculated the probability that the megalithic alignments at Nabta were random at less than two chances in a million, which, as he writes “is more than a thousand times as certain as the usual three standard deviations requirement for accepting a scientific hypothesis as valid.” The only reasonable conclusion is that the star alignments at Nabta Playa were carefully planned–––no accident.
But hold on, because from here Brophy ventures into wild territory. He was puzzled by the fact that the Nabta megaliths were not placed at uniform distances from the central point. Brophy writes: “If the varied distances didn’t have a purpose, one would expect the skilled Nabta Playa designers to have used a more pleasing arrangement… [therefore] the distance placements are suggestive of a meaningful pattern.” Students of the Giza plateau have often remarked that no detail of the famous pyramids was left to chance. Every angle, every relationship, every aspect, had a definite purpose. Brophy merely guessed that the same might hold at Nabta Playa. So, what did the variable distances of the megaliths from the central point represent? After considering a number of alternatives, just for fun Brophy theorized: What if the distances on the ground were proportional to the actual distances of the stars from earth? When he looked up the current best measurements as determined by the Hipparcos Space Astronomy Satellite, Brophy was blown away. They matched in each case to within about a standard deviation. The proportional scale turned out to be one meter on the ground at Nabta = .799 light years. The match is “more than astonishing,” as Brophy writes, because even with modern technology the science of measuring the distances to stars is a tricky and imperfect business. Current best measures of distance must be regarded as approximations. Brophy’s conclusion bears repeating: “If these star distances are the intended meaning of the Nabta Playa map, and are not coincidence, then much of what we think we know about prehistoric human civilizations must be revisited.”
Brophy believes information about the relative velocities of stars, and their masses, may also be encoded in the placements. And he thinks that smaller companion stones lying near the base of some of the large megaliths probably represent companion stars, or even planetary systems. Unfortunately, this cannot be tested at present because astronomy is not yet able to observe earth-sized planets across the reaches of space. Rapid strides are being made, however. A number of Jupiter-sized giants have already been detected and resolving power continues to improve. Soon we may know if Brophy’s staggering idea is correct.
A Galaxy Map?
Nabta Playa held other surprises. The location of the star map’s central point initially drew the attention of Wendorf’s team because a complex structure of megaliths had been placed there. One large stone stood squarely at the central point, surrounded by others. Numerous other stone complexes had also been placed in the vicinity. These appeared to be burial mounds and when the archaeologists excavated two of them the team expected to uncover mortuary remains. Instead, they dug through 12 feet of Holocene sediments to bedrock and found bizarre carved sculptures, which they never did explain. Later, Brophy examined these in light of the deciphered star map and was blown away again. He realized that whoever created Nabta Playa might have been in possession of advanced knowledge about our Milky Way galaxy. The bedrock sculpture appears to be a made-to-scale map of the Milky Way as viewed from the outside, i.e., from the perspective of the north galactic pole. The map correctly indicates the position, scale, and orientation of our sun, and the placements of the spiral arms, the galactic center, even the associated Sagittarius dwarf galaxy that was only discovered in 1994. Although Wendorf’s excavation had dismantled the stone complex on the surface in the process of exhuming the underlying sculpture, Brophy was able to determine from Wendorf’s accurate diagrams/maps that the central point was directly above–––and surely represented–––the correct position of our sun on the galaxy map. Brophy then made another key discovery: One of the megalithic sight lines stood in relation to the galactic center. Its alignment marked the galactic center’s vernal heliacal rising circa 17,700 B.C.. Amazingly, the orientation of the galactic plane in the sculpture also jibed with this date. Brophy concluded that the stone sculpture was a map of the Milky Way as seen from the standpoint of the northern galactic pole. Next, he turned his attention to the second stone complex excavated by Wendorf’s team which, likewise, had produced no mortuary remains. Its size and placement suggested that it was a map of Andromeda, our sister galaxy. Calculations showed that its size– ––about double the Milky Way–––and its placement may be consistent with Andromeda’s known size/location.
As for Nabta Playa’s other stone complexes, they have not yet been investigated…
Giza: A Precessional Calendar?
Brophy also conducted his own independent investigation of Giza, and there too found evidence the designers knew about the galactic center. Brophy’s powerful software enabled him to refine Robert Bauval’s estimate of the great pyramid’s correlation date. Brophy agrees that the famous star shafts serve as markers that fix the date of correlation to within a narrow window. When Brophy precessed the sky above Giza he found that the best shaft alignment occurred around 2,360 B.C.–––about a half-century later than Bauval’s date. Bauval argued that the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber aligned with Orion at the time of construction. But Brophy found that the last of the three stars of Orion’s belt, Al Nitak (Zeta Orionis) aligned with the southern shaft more than a century before. The southern star shaft’s alignment with the galactic center at the time of pyramid construction also corroborated his findings at Nabta Playa.
Assuming that the layout at Giza is a mirror of Orion’s belt, when exactly did this occur? Bauval’s preferred date is 10,500 BC, long before the pyramids were actually built, when the three stars of Orion’s belt reached their southern culmination of the 26,000 year precessional cycle. When Brophy tested this idea, however, he discovered another layer of complexity. He found that the ground mirrored heaven on two dates: in 11,772 B.C. and again in 9,420 B.C. Brophy concluded that the construction was never intended to designate Orion’s southern culmination, as Bauval argued, but rather to bracket the epoch in which this occurred. The two dates also bracket another important event, the northern culmination of the galactic center at around 11,000 B.C. In other words, Giza was constructed as a zodiacal clock, set in stone to the grand precessional cycle. This supports the view that the site’s astronomy long predated the actual pyramid construction.
Fully cognizant of the revolutionary nature of his analysis, Brophy wisely makes no final pronouncements in his book. He merely presents his findings as a working hypothesis and invites others to investigate further. Fortunately, many of his ideas are testable. So far, only 25 Nabta stones have been plotted with GPS, and only two of at least thirty stone complexes have been excavated. Time will surely tell…
Mark Gaffney is author of Dimona the Third Temple? (1989), a study of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. His latest is Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes (2004), an investigation of a third-century Gnostic source text. E-mail
him at: mhgaffney@sbcglobal.net. His web site is www.gnos-ticsecrets.com.
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