THE AGE OF A PYRAMID.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 177, 18 August 1876, Page 14

THE AGE OF A PYRAMID.

Modern scholarship seems destined to win its most' signal triumphs through the application of a careful scientific method to its researches into the past history of our race. It multiplies its aids, extends the range of its evidences, and, by looking far beyond the field of the old chroniclers, is at last able to correct their discrepancies. Where the records of earth are at variance, it consults the unerring stars, and fixes the chronology of events more wisely than the historian who wrote only a few generations after their occurrence. The German astronomer, Hansen, was one of the first to determine the day and hour of an ancient battle by calculating the eclipse of the sun which occurred at the same time j and now the French Egyptologists, profiting by the remarkable astronomical knowledge of the Egyptians, are applying the same methods of verification, with wonderful success, to the hieroglyphic records. At the meeting of the French Academy on Inscriptions, on the 7th of April, M. de Sauley read a paper in regard to a discovery by the scholar Chabas, which for the first time introduces a positive date into the oldest Egyptian history. Hitherto, the distinguished Egyptologist, M. de Rouge, has only succeeded in establishing three dates with absolute certainty — the years 1300, 1240, and 962 8.C., the last of these being the taking of Jerusalem by Sheskonk 1., the Shishak of the Bible. But two or three months ago M. Chabas was fortunate enough to succeed in reading a doubtful cartouche (royal name, inclosed in an oval figure) in the famous Ebers papyrus, a fac-simile of which was published last year. It proved to be the name of the Pharaoh, Menkeres, the Mycerinus of the Greek historians, and the builder of the third or smallest pyramid at Gizeh. Attached to the cartouche was an astronomical note, stating that the heliacal rising of the star Sothis occurred in the ninth year of the reign of Menkeres. The ancient Egyptians had the habit of signalising important political events by some contemporaneous astronomical phenomenon. Many of the latter could scarcely be identified or determined now; but, since we know that their Sothis, is our star Sirius, we are easily able to fix the rare periods of its heliacal rising. This is the astronomical term used when a star, after being in conjunction with the sun and invisible, emerges from the light sufficiently to be seen just before sunrise. M. Chabas immediately took his discovery to the astronomer Biot, who made the necessary calculations, whence it appears that the heliacal rising of Sothis, in the ninth year of the reign of Menkeres, must have taken place between the years 3007 and 3010 b.c. M. de Sauley stated that he had made the calculation independently, and with precisely the same result. He was entirely convinced of the correctness of the date. As the first assured step towards establishing, if only in its general outlines, the chronology of the ancient Egyptian empire, this discovery is of incalculable importance. It fixes the age of the third pyramid of Gizeh at about 4,880 years, and antedates by fully 1,770 years the earliest accurately ascertained point in ancient chronology. These detached epochs are like so many solid piers in the flood of time, and, though still too far apart to be bridged, they furnish secure resting-places for the historian. It is not too much to expect, that when the aid of astronomy is called to the investigation of the Assyrian as well as the Egyptian records, we may restore the chronological chart of both empires from the silent testimony of the heavens.