The date is April 1, 2471 B.C., and a total solar eclipse has forced night to fall during the day in Egypt. The sun has morphed into a lifeless black circle surrounded by a milky halo, a consequence of the moon passing perfectly between the Earth and its radiant star. Darkness has swept across the Nile Delta. The sacred city of Buto’s usual luster has been blanketed in shadow.
Pharaoh Shepsekaf, the reigning ruler of the fourth Egyptian dynasty, is shaken. Could this be an ominous message from the heavens?
Such is the picture painted by a new study from archaeoastronomer Giulio Magli, who calculated that this ancient solar eclipse’s path of totality coincides with a major shift in Egyptian tradition that occurred in tandem with Shepsekaf’s tenure: a shift away from solar worship. “This king precisely corresponds to the eclipse,” Magli, a professor of Archaeoastronomy at the Department of Mathematics of the Politecnico di Milano, told Space.com. “I say precisely because I’m adopting here one of the possible chronologies of the Old Kingdom. There are others, because it is not easy to fix the dates of the beginning of the regnal years — but also in the other chronologies, it is compatible.”
A missing suffix and a missing pyramid
It has been known for a long time that ancient Egyptians venerated the sun; for instance, the god who took the form of a falcon, Horus, was typically depicted with a right eye representing the sun as a source of power. (The god’s left eye represented the moon as a source of healing). Then, by the time of the fourth Egyptian dynasty, the well-known sun god Ra became the primary symbol of the Egyptian solar cult. Fourth dynasty rulers even typically adopted a suffix to their names that paid tribute to Ra.
“Khufu was a sort of solarized king,” Magli explained of the second ruler of the fourth Egyptian dynasty. And some of the pharaohs after Khufu include Khafre, Djedefra and Menkaure — the latter of whom was likely Shepsekaf’s father. But something clearly changed when it came down to Shepsekaf.
His name, first off, doesn’t adopt the suffix that relates to the sun god — and that’s not all.
The Pharaoh Shepsekaf, as Magli explains, was buried in a tomb that surprisingly did not face Heliopolis, a city and major religious center associated with Ra. Shepsekaf’s tomb also isn’t christened with a pyramid as was the case with other pharaohs.
The three famous pyramids of Giza, for context, were each built during the fourth dynasty of Egypt. The first of the trio was constructed as a royal tomb for Khufu. The next was built for Khafre, the fourth ruler, and the third was built for Menkaure, the fifth ruler. “They are solar kings, and they are in plain view of Heliopolis, which was the main place of the solar cult,” Magli explained.
Shepsekaf, on the other hand, was buried in a monument Magli says resembles structures in Buto, a sacred site in the delta of the Nile. Importantly, if you recall, this is the site that sat right in the center of the 2471 B.C. solar eclipse path of totality.
“No one has been able to explain it, and my idea is that it resembles a building which was in the most sacred place inside the part of totality,” Magli said.
It is also worth considering that these huge shifts away from the solar cult that coincide with Shepsekaf’s reign were widely known already. However, Magli says it wasn’t previously possible to pinpoint a specific reason for them, mostly because mathematical calculations concerning ancient paths of totality needed to be improved before a connection could be made.
“In the last years, colleagues working specifically on the reconstruction of dates and paths of totality of ancient eclipses made great progress,” Magli said. “It’s easy to know the days and the times of ancient eclipses. This is just the mechanics of the three bodies — this is easy. What you do not know is where on the Earth the umbra of the moon is projected, because this depends on the rotation of the Earth if it is not constant — and in fact it is not constant.”
Though unnoticeable by us on a regular basis, our planet does experience microscopic fluctuations in its rotation; for instance, adjustments to the mass distribution across our planet can affect the positioning of Earth’s axis, and indeed how quickly it rotates.
Furthermore on the topic of ancient solar eclipses, experts have previously found some references to these events in Egyptian literature. For example, as Magli’s study states, in the dedication to 18th dynasty pharaoh Tutankhamen upon a limestone record known as the “Stela of Huy,” it says ‘I see the darkness during the daylight (that) you have made, illumine me so that I may see you.'” Still, he explains, there aren’t concrete pieces of information about solar eclipses in any Egyptian text found thus far.
Though eventually, the solar cult gets a comeback.
The solar resurgence
It looks slightly different than it did with the fourth dynasty, but solar worship seems to resume with the fifth Egyptian dynasty — the pharaohs of which built their tombs in association with pyramids too, though none were quite as outstanding as the pyramids of Giza.
This solar worship was connected with the construction of a new building, Magli says, which is called “The Sun Temple.” Each pharaoh of the fifth dynasty built one of these structures in addition to a pyramid, he says.
It’s disputed whether each physically “built” a new sun temple or renewed a previous temple, but the pharaohs made their sun temple marks nonetheless.
With improved calculations about paths of totality in hand, Magli was also able to decode something fascinating about another total solar eclipse that impacted ancient Egyptian civilizations. This other eclipse appeared to have occurred a stunning 1,000 years later. And the general reaction to it has been considered quite surprising.
Omen nuances
On May 14, 1338 B.C., once again, night fell during the day in Egypt.
This time, the reigning ruler was Akhenaten of the 18th Egyptian dynasty — but what’s interesting is that Akhenaten didn’t seem to fear the cold, dark sun shining above his land.
“This king was the establisher of a new solar monotheistic god,” Magli explained. “And this eclipse occurred exactly where he founded this new capital in the middle region, which is a place which is lost in nowhere — it’s lost in the desert.”
Why would that be?
On one hand, Magli says it’s possible Akhenetan was aware of the total solar eclipse that happened during Shepsekaf’s time because of how “impressive” the cultural continuity of Egypt is. Perhaps the 18th-dynasty Pharaoh was somehow told that the solar cult needn’t be abandoned in light of a total solar eclipse. Yet we can’t know for sure, mostly because of the lack of direct scriptures relating to solar eclipses from ancient Egyptian archives.
“It is always difficult to establish if the eclipses were seen in the ancient past as bad omens or good omens,” Magli said, mentioning that it’s a similar situation for confirming whether comets from the past were considered blessings or not.
“Comets were usually considered as bad omens, but we have in Italy the most glaring example of a comet considered as a good omen,” he said. “Augustus founded the imperial power of Rome on the passage of a comet during the days of the death of Caesar.”
Yet what we do know is that ancient Egyptians were quite attuned to both astronomy — following cyclic phases of the moon and paying attention to stellar patterns — as well as omens in general — the worst of which is thought to be the Nile not reaching expected heights after regular periods of heavy rains.
Those aspects are known because of evidence, and that’s why Magli hopes we’ll soon stumble upon some first-hand sources concerning what Shepsekaf really thought about the solar eclipse that shrouded his kingdom. “The architectural settings of the Shepsekaf period have to be studied much more,” he said. “It may be that there we find texts … it would be very important to excavate them.”
“I’ve been researching the pyramids for many years. To me, it is fundamental to touch it. You cannot speak about the monument without touching it,” he added. “We have the instruments to analyze monuments from the air, from satellite images and so on — and I do use them — but I think that this cannot be in substitution of touching the stones.”
