In the countries outside Egypt the equinoctial cult prevailed
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In the countries outside Egypt the equinoctial cult prevailed. An architect today will speak of "orienting" a church, by which he means strictly "making it face east"; and most Catholic and Episcopal churches try to be so oriented. But in Egypt the fight between the equinoxes and the solstices formed a great part of history, and in the end the original inhabitants prevailed. So the great Temple of Karnak, begun in 3000 B. C., seems to have changed its direction violently but, when it was finished under the supervision of Thutmose III in 1500 B. C., it faced the setting Sun at the summer solstice. By that time it was over a quarter of a mile in length, and its walls were ornamented with countless engravings. Behind the temple stood an obelisk ninety-seven feet high, erected to tell time in hours while the temple told time in years. The obelisk was built in less than seven months by the first great woman in history, Hatshepsut, Queen of Egypt. There are traces of a covering which the Queen's brother Thutmose III added to obliterate the shameful fact that a woman had been Queen of Egypt; but the Thutmose masonry has fallen away through the ages and the name of Hatshepsut stands firm on her monument.
Egypt was not the only country where buildings were set to the Sun. In Babylonia about 3000 B. C., the Sumerians had come down from the mountains and were building step-pyramids, which they called ziggurats, perhaps in image of the four-square earth, perhaps in memory of the mountains they had left behind them. The ziggurats were neither temples nor tombs, but observatories with a shrine of the god on the top, and a temple at the side. They were the ancestors of the Tower of Babel and of our own church spires.
Other countries, some of them so far from Egypt that any connection seems most unlikely, also built to the Sun. We cannot, of course, assume that each structure set due east and west showed a knowledge of the equinoxes, nor that each temple set to an angle of about twenty-four degrees north of west or east indicates the solstices; but when so great a proportion of buildings all over the world do tend to group themselves in these directions, we can fairly make some inference. The necessity for knowing the seasons was not limited to Egypt or Babylon; and all countries, the world over, celebrate seasonal change with festival days.
Far away from Egypt in Central America the ancient Aztec and Maya ruins show buildings set to all four changes of the year. In Pekin the temple of the Sun was faced to the winter solstice. The kivas of the Pueblo Indians were presumably seasonal and, far northward into Britain, the remains that the Druids left seem to indicate that they worshiped the Sun at Midsummer's Day.
Presumably there were star temples as well. The Nile valley is dotted with them. No doubt their builders thought that temples hitched to the "fixed stars" were good for all time. It was thirteen hundred years after the last great star temple was finished that Hipparchus discovered the Precession of the Equinoxes by which the apparent position of the stars is changed; and by that time precession had already rendered the temples useless. The solar buildings were not affected by precession, and they continued to be useful for a few thousand years instead of a few hundred. But at last even they were upset by a much slower motion--the change in the "Obliquity of the Ecliptic."
The Precession of the Equinoxes will be dealt with in its own chapter. But the obliquity of the ecliptic is the cause of seasons, so this is the place where it should be explained.
The Egyptians gauged the coming of seasons by noticing which stars rose and set with the Sun. Gradually, throughout the twelve months of the year, the Sun's position among the stars seems to change. For one month the stars in the constellation of the Ram may rise with the Sun; but by the end of the month the Sun has passed through the whole constellation, and with the beginning of the next month the Sun rises in the Bull. When a year has passed, the time of the Ram will have come again.
From early to modern times, this apparent annual path of the Sun has been represented by a great circle in the skies. We call it the ecliptic, because no eclipses can occur elsewhere than on this line. By definition the ecliptic is the path of the Sun. The apparent path of the Moon crosses it twice as if they were two intersecting hoops. Actually, of course, the Moon's path is incomparably nearer to us than the Sun's. Eclipses occur only where their paths seem to cross, when a straight line can be drawn between some part of the Earth, Moon and Sun.
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