Taking the latitude of Edfû as 25°, and assuming the angle of 40° to be not far from the truth, the North Polar distance of the star observed would be 15°.
Within a degree or so—and this is as near as we can get till more accurate observations have been made on the spot—this satisfies Dubhe, the chief star in the Great Bear in the time of the Ptolemies. Supposing the temple was originally oriented to Dubhe, its amplitude, 86½° S. of W., gives us the date 3900 B.C. I shall show, however, that it is more probable that the temple was oriented on some southern star.
I may here remark that, so far as I know, Edfû is the temple in Egypt nearest the meridian. If, therefore, it were used as, on my theory, all other temples were, it could only have picked up the light from each of the southerly stars, as by the precessional movements they were brought into visibility very near the southern horizon.
In this respect, then, it is truly a temple of Horns, in relation to the southern stars—the southern eyes of Horus. But it was not a sun-temple in the sense that Karnak was one; and if ceremonies were performed for which light was required, perhaps the apparatus referred to by the writer Dupuis[48] was utilised. He mentions that in a temple at Heliopolis—whether a solar temple or not is not stated—the temple was flooded all day long with sunlight by means of a mirror. I do not know the authorities on which Dupuis founds his statement, but I have no doubt that it is amply justified, for the reason that doubtless all the inscriptions in the deepest tombs were made by means of reflected sunlight, for in all freshly-opened tombs there are no traces whatever of any kind of combustion having taken place, even in the inner-most recesses. So strikingly evident is this that my friend M. Bouriant, while we were discussing this matter at Thebes, laughingly suggested the possibility that the electric light was known to the ancient Egyptians.
With a system of fixed mirrors inside the galleries, whatever their length, and a movable mirror outside to follow the course of an Egyptian sun and reflect its beams inside, it would be possible to keep up a constant illumination in any part of the galleries, however remote.
Dupuis quotes another statement that the greatest precautions were taken that the first rays of sunlight should enter a temple (of course, he means a solar temple).
But it is possible that there might have been another temple at right angles, facing nearly due east. In this case, the larger temple would have been named after the worship to which the smaller one was dedicated. If so, unlike the solar temples at Heliopolis, Abydos, and Thebes, the Edfû temple was sacred to the Equinoctial Sun, or, at all events, to the Sun very near an equinox.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE STAR-TEMPLES AT KARNAK.
When I began my studies of the Egyptian temples the building inscriptions referred to in the preceding chapter lay forgotten in the Egyptologist's archives. I purpose now to give some account of my work at Thebes, where I made a special study of the temples, because there is a very great number there, and many are in a fair state of preservation. These investigations convinced me that temples were oriented to stars before the inscriptions in question were known to me, although the whole temple field is so crowded with temples, each apparently blocking up the fair-way of the other, that it seems well-nigh impossible that any such process as that described in the last chapter could have been applied.
This difficulty will be gathered from the accompanying folding plate giving a reproduction of Lepsius's general maps of the temple region of Karnak, showing his reference letters and also the true north and the orientation of the chief temples. We have already dealt with the solar temple of Amen-Rā.