From earliest times the first act in the construction of important temples was a foundation ceremony, during which the king performed a ritual version of the basic building operations (Wilkinson 2000c: 111-12, 139; Engelbach 1934; Montet 1964; Weinstein 1973: chapter 1). During the action of outlining the building plan on the ground the king was said to be ‘‘looking at the sky, observing the stars and turning his gaze to the Great Bear’’. In other passages, the ‘‘stride of Re’’ and the ‘‘shadow’’ are also mentioned in connection with the same action, thus suggesting that the orientation of the buildings might be achieved either by using the stars or the sun (Arnold 1991: 16).
The careful study of some buildings confirmed that the sun was involved in their design: the funerary complex of Khafre appears to have been aligned along the rays of the setting sun at the equinoxes (Lehner 1997: 129-30), and the temple of Abu Simbel was designed so that twice a year the sun would reach the innermost sanctuary (Wilkinson 2003: 226). Stars appear to have been the target of other monuments: the inlaid eyes of the statue of king Djoser placed in the serdab at the back of his pyramid were fixed on the circumpolar stars, and it is possible that the so-called air-shafts of the pyramid of Khufu pointed in the direction of specific stars (Lehner 1997: 90 and 112-14).
Other cases are less straightforward. The astronomical orientation of pyramids, for instance, is the subject of a heated debate that opposes supporters of solar and the stellar alignment (Isler 2001; iZaba 1953). Within the latter group, there is no agreement on which stars might have been used (see Maravelia 2003 for a summary of the discussion triggered by Spence 2000), nor on which method might have been used to fix the four cardinal points (Edwards 1993; Dorner 1981). Because of the lack of clear textual evidence and the need to test the theoretical methods in the field and to combine computer-generated models with practical observations, the discussion inevitably remains open.
World History
