Wednesday, October 12, 2005

12 - The Cult of Horus and the Origins of Astronomy - Nr. 12

12 - The Cult of Horus
and the Origins of Astronomy - Nr. 12




Figure 7: Serekh of the king NEB-RE [Nebra]
Metropolitan Museum (New York)

The mainstream-authoritative British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt describes a "serekh" as follows:[33]

"The term [serekh] is usually employed to refer to a rectangular frame surmounted by the HORUS falcon, within which the king’s 'Horus name' was written.... This frame seems to have effectively symbolized the domain of Horus, the royal residence [as in Figure 7 above]. For a brief period, in the 2nd Dynasty... SETH replaced Horus as the god surmounting the serekh [for the kings Peribsen and Khasekhemwy], thus transforming it into a 'Seth name', but the change was short lived...." [34]

As we explain in great detail later, this short-term replacement of HORUS through SETH is of enormous importance for understanding and interpreting the Horus and Seth names of the Pharaohs as astronomy.

The Egyptologists think that the lower part of the serekh represents a stylized palace facade. In this regard, the Newby Palette of the Double Falcon shows that this "enclosure" was first found above the falcon and thus could not originally have represented a palace on earth.

Rather, the Pharaohs seem to have viewed heaven’s center as a fenced-in "area of the pole star", which was then subsequently used as the insignia for the name of the king.
Furthermore, we suspect that the Egyptian word serekh is related to the Indo-European root term *ser- "protect"[35] as found e.g. in Latvian sarg- "protect, guard" and German Sarg "coffin, protection of the body". The center of heaven was thus seen as a zone protected by the falcon(s).
__________
[33] Serekh, Ian Shaw & Paul Nicholson, British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, British Museum Press, 1995, p. 261.
[34] See also in German, Horus-Name, "In dem oberen Teil eines sog. Serech (stilisierte Palastfassade...) steht der Horus-Name des Pharaos. Der untere Teil repräsentiert die Palastfassade. Oberhalb des Serechs befindet sich der Horusfalke mit den entsprechenden königlichen Attributen (Verbindung Pharao/Horus). Statt des Horus-Falken kann auch das (mythische) Seth-Tier oberhalb des Serechs erscheinen, wie z.B. bei Peribsen (Seth-Name), einem König der 2. Dynastie.... Ein anderer König derselben Dynastie führt sowohl den Horus-Falken als auch das Seth-Tier auf dem Serech; sein Horus-Seth-Name lautet 'Chasechemui'...."[35] *ser-1, Indo-European Roots.

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Sky Earth Native America


Sky Earth Native America 1:
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
,
Volume 1, Edition 2, 266 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Sky Earth Native America 2:
    American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
    Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
    ,
    Volume 2, Edition 2, 262 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".
    The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.

    -----

    Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:
    "Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist
    that there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America, e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska,
    geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.
    See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,
    American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.
    Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:
    "These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,
    drawing them according to their magnitude.
    The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study.
    ... They were keen observers....
    The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomy comparable to that of the early white men."
    See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,
    American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.
    In our book, we take these observations one level further
    and show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carving and pictographic rock art in Native America,
    together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarks
    placed according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry sky
    in the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".
    That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,
    whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens, "immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,
    cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.
    These landmarks were placed systematically in North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South America
    and can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."


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