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that day of the Festival of the Year . . . 22
     
     
     
    O king, you have not died the death; live among them the Imperishable Spirits; when the season of Inundation (Akhet) comes, provide the efflux which issues from Osiris . . . 23
     
     
    The king is bound for the eastern side of the sky, for the king was conceived there and the king was born there. The Prince (successor of the king) ascends in a great storm from the inner horizon; he sees the preparation of the festival, the making of the brazier, the birth of the gods before you in the Five Epagomenal Days . . . 24
     
    More direct evidence of the civil calendar in the Old Kingdom is found in the Fourth Dynasty ( c. 2500 BC) tomb of Princess Mersyankh III, a daughter of King Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid. An inscription on the entrance to her tomb at Giza, which was studied by the American Egyptologists Dows Dunham and William Kelly Simpson in 1974, gives the date of her death (referred to as ‘proceeding to the House of Purification’) and the date of her burial (referred to as ‘proceeding to her beautiful tomb’):
    King’s daughter Mersyankh, Year 1, month 1 of Shemu, day 21: the resting of her Ka and her proceeding to the House of Purification.
     
     
     
    King’s daughter Mersyankh, Year 2, month 2 of Proyet, day 18: her proceeding to her beautiful tomb. 25
     
     
    Oddly, the time between Mersyankh’s death and her burial was 273 days, 26 a figure that comes very close to nine months. This has been taken by some scholars to refer probably to a ‘gestation period’ of the mummy (as a sort of ‘foetus’) awaiting rebirth in the tomb. But whatever the meaning of this time lapse between Mersyankh’s death and burial, it is undeniable that the ancient scribe was using the civil calendar when he carved the inscription. But how old was this calendar? How long before Mersyankh’s death was it first put into use?
     
    This is where the drift of the calendar relative to the heliacal rising of Sirius comes in handy.
     

The ‘Rebirth’ of Sirius
     
    In many ancient cultures the star Sirius was known as ‘the sparkling one’, the ‘scorching one’ or, less flatteringly in Roman times, the ‘dog star’. These odd names are because its heliacal rising occurred in the height of summer when the sun was at its hottest, the ‘dog days’ of the Roman year. The Greeks, however, called this star ‘Sothis’. 27 Modern astronomers know it as Alpha Canis Major or by its common name Sirius. 28 The American astronomer Robert Burnham Jr describes it as being
    . . . the brightest of the fixed stars, ‘the leader of the host of heaven’, and a splendid object throughout the winter months for observers in the northern hemisphere. To Americans the coming of Sirius heralds the approach of the Christmas season and conjures up visions of sparkling frosty nights . . . On New Year’s Eve (it) dominates the southern sky, reaching culmination just at midnight. 29
     
     
     
    Sirius, however, does not stand alone. It is, in fact, part of a bright constellation we call Canis Major, commonly known as the Great Dog, which trails behind Orion the Hunter. Being the brightest of all the visible stars, Sirius is classed as a first-magnitude star with a value of -1.42. This makes it nine times more brilliant than any other of the first-magnitude stars. It is even said that it can be seen in broad daylight with the aid of a small telescope. Its colour is a brilliant bluish-white, sometimes with pulsating faint flashes of blue. Sirius, quite simply, is the Kohinoor of the starry world. In cosmic terms, being only 8.7 light-years away, it is in our back yard. It is the second nearest star to us after Alpha Centauri.
     
    Today, seen from the latitude of Giza, Sirius rises some 20° south of east. This will hold fairly true for the span of a human life. But eventually Sirius will be seen rising a little further south because of the effect of precession (see Appendix 2).