The above-given inscriptions show that they had a distinct symbolism for each of the months. Gods or goddesses are given for ten months out of the twelve, and where we have not these we have the hippopotamus (or the pig) and the jackal, two circumpolar constellations. I think there is no question that we are dealing here with these constellations, though the figures have been supposed to represent something quite different.
There are also myths and symbols of the twelve changes during the twelve hours of the day; the sun being figured as a child at rising, as an old man when setting in the evening. These ideas were also transferred to the annual motion of the sun. In Macrobius, as quoted by Krall, we find the statement that the Egyptians compared the yearly course of the sun also with the phases of human life.
| Little child | = Winter Solstice. |
| Young man | = Spring Equinox. |
| Bearded man | = Summer Solstice. |
| Old man | = Autumnal Equinox. |
With the day of the Summer Solstice the sun reaches the greatest northern rising amplitude, and at the Winter Solstice its greatest southern amplitude. By the solstices the year is divided into two approximately equal parts; during one the points of rising move southwards, during the other northwards.
This phenomenon, it is stated, was symbolised by the two eyes of Rā, the so-called Utchats, which look in different directions. They appear as representing the sun in the two halves of the year.
We have next to discuss the fixed year, to which the Egyptian chronologists were finally driven in later Egyptian times. The decree of Tanis was the true precursor of the Julian correction of the calendar. In consequence of this correction we now add a day every four years to the end of February. The decree regulated the addition, by the Egyptians, of a day every four years by adding a day to the epacts, which were thus six every four years instead of being always five, as they had been before.
In fact, it replaced the vague year by the sacred year long known to the priests.
But if everything had gone on then as the priests of Tanis imagined, the Egyptian New Year's Day, if determined by the heliacal rising of Sirius, would not always afterwards have been the 1st of Payni, although the solstice and Nile flood would have been clue at Memphis about the 1st of Pachons; and this is, perhaps, one among the reasons why the decree was to a large extent ignored.
Hence, for some years after the date of the decree of Tanis, there were at least three years in force—the new fixed year, the new vague year, reckoning from Pachons, and the old vague year, reckoning from Thoth.