Abstract
III
IN the previous articles I have endeavoured to show that the Egyptians had the Sirius year and the vague year so related to each other that the successive coincidences of the 1st Thoth in both years took place after intervals of 1460 Sirian years. With a real year, the length of which would be brought home to them by the regular recurrence of the solstices and Nile flood (to say nothing of the equinoxes) and the year of 360 days which they would soon find to be quite artificial and unreal; they would be much more likely to refer the dates in the artificial year to the real one, than to take the opposite course, and, as I have shown, the artificial dates would sweep backwards through the realones. Such a method of reckoning, however, would be useless for calendar purposes, as they not only wanted to define the days of the year but the years themselves, and I pointed out that something more was necessary, and that an easy way of defining years would be to conceive a great year, or annus magnus, consisting of 1460 years, each “day” of which would represent four years in actual time; and further to consider every event, the year of which had to be chronicled in relation to others to take place on the day of the heliacal rising of Sirius or the nearly coincident Nile flood, which, as we shall see, occurred, at different periods of Egyptian history, on the 1st Thoth and 1st Pachons.
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LOCKYER, J. The Origin of the Year1. Nature 47, 32–35 (1892). https://doi.org/10.1038/047032a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/047032a0