
SHOMU-season (Harvest)
Fourth Month: Wp-rnpt
Day 8 – 21st June. Wadjet ceremony. If you see anything, it will be good on this day. Summer Solstice – the ancient New Year and the rising of Sirius. Prayer or divinatory time: throughout the day.
Aker: one of the earliest Egyptian earth gods and the deification of the horizon. He represents the horizon where the sun rises in the East and the sun sets in the West. He is believed to be protecting the sun god Re, as he enters the netherworld during sunset and returns to the land of the living at sunrise.
Text: Aker features prominently in the New Kingdom Book of Caverns and Book of the Earth, i.e., ‘of Aker’, a title suggested for it in the absence of a surviving title from antiquity. In the former, which charts the passage of Re by night through a series of caverns to visit Osiris, Aker, who has here seven assistants depicted as catfish-headed men, protects or encloses the corpse of Osiris, transmitting to him the revitalizing energy of Re, which renders the corpse ithyphallic in anticipation of its resurrection.
For thousands of years, the Nile flood would have reached Aswan by the last week in June (Summer Solstice) and reached its full height near Cairo by September. The floods would begin to subside about two weeks later to allow for the first crops planted in October and November to ripen in March and April when the river was at its lowest level. Another complication caused by six thousand years of precession (the gravitational pull by the sun and moon), meant that the Egyptian New Year now fell around 19th July (according to the old Julian calendar). Also, as a result of modern developments in Egypt, the annual flooding of the Nile has not happened since the completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1971.
The Calendar of Ancient Egypt: Melusine Draco (revised and expanded edition)
ISBN: 9781788765831 : Paperback :Pages 202 : €7.95
To order: https://www.feedaread.com/books/The-Calendar-of-Ancient-Egypt-9781788765831.aspx
Also available in Kindle e-book.
Fourth Month: Wp-rnpt
Day 8 – 21st June. Wadjet ceremony. If you see anything, it will be good on this day. Summer Solstice – the ancient New Year and the rising of Sirius. Prayer or divinatory time: throughout the day.
Aker: one of the earliest Egyptian earth gods and the deification of the horizon. He represents the horizon where the sun rises in the East and the sun sets in the West. He is believed to be protecting the sun god Re, as he enters the netherworld during sunset and returns to the land of the living at sunrise.
Text: Aker features prominently in the New Kingdom Book of Caverns and Book of the Earth, i.e., ‘of Aker’, a title suggested for it in the absence of a surviving title from antiquity. In the former, which charts the passage of Re by night through a series of caverns to visit Osiris, Aker, who has here seven assistants depicted as catfish-headed men, protects or encloses the corpse of Osiris, transmitting to him the revitalizing energy of Re, which renders the corpse ithyphallic in anticipation of its resurrection.
For thousands of years, the Nile flood would have reached Aswan by the last week in June (Summer Solstice) and reached its full height near Cairo by September. The floods would begin to subside about two weeks later to allow for the first crops planted in October and November to ripen in March and April when the river was at its lowest level. Another complication caused by six thousand years of precession (the gravitational pull by the sun and moon), meant that the Egyptian New Year now fell around 19th July (according to the old Julian calendar). Also, as a result of modern developments in Egypt, the annual flooding of the Nile has not happened since the completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1971.
The Calendar of Ancient Egypt: Melusine Draco (revised and expanded edition)
ISBN: 9781788765831 : Paperback :Pages 202 : €7.95
To order: https://www.feedaread.com/books/The-Calendar-of-Ancient-Egypt-9781788765831.aspx
Also available in Kindle e-book.