Wp Rnpt, The Sothic Cycle, and historical intent

Astronomical Ceiling at Sesenmut's tomb, circa 1500 BCE

table of Sothic Cycle literary references provided by Long

8/8 is almost here, and if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve already heard my thoughts on the matter. But rather than re-hash criticisms of new age thought (I actually have no horse in that race - believe Cayce all you want, just maybe avoid claiming ancient Lion’s Gate origins), I wanted to dive further into the historicity of the Sothic cycle itself, which isn’t without debate, even among (especially among) scholars.

I’ll point to two papers worth a read for some background on this, and both are available for free on JSTOR. The first, “A Re-examination of the Sothic Chronology of Egypt” by Ronald D. Long, (Orientalia, NOVA SERIES, Vol. 43, 1974), provides a table of extant Sothic cycle references dating back to the Old Kingdom, and is valuable in that it outlines the relative dirth of data on the timing of the heliacal rise of Sirius. As academics have pointed out, this isn’t always an indicator of something not being important; rather, the Sothic cycle may have been so ubiquitous in previous ages that it wasn’t worth documenting. But it also doesn’t give us too much to work with. The name that kept popping up in the research (and the historical personage most associated with an accurate dating for the Sothic cycle), is Censorinus, a Roman philologist writing in the 3rd century AD.

 So, not an Egyptian, and moreover, someone writing about a culture that shared a wider gulf with their own time period than we do with Censorinus. The second article, “Censorinus, the Sothic Cycle, and Calendar Year One in Ancient Egypt: The Epistemological Problem” by Patrick F. O’Mara (Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 62 No. 1 (January 2003), dives into Censorinus’ qualifications as a calendrical expert. It seems that his book, De Die Natali, was an  exercise in ego-stroking, utilizing calendrical cycles to support the idea that his patron (for whom the book was intended) should live a long life. While he appears to have cribbed many references from Varro (who lived a few centuries earlier), he does not cite a source for his Sothic cycle dating.

What becomes problematic in the study of any ancient culture and subsequently its texts and calendars, is that our ability (or inability) to mentally orient ourselves within the time period robs us of much of the context and complicates exegesis. When information is translated through time, space, language, political intent, and magical milieu (Censorinus seems to vibe with Pythagoreanism), we can lose the plot fast, especially if our chief source’s motive was to impress his boss. Nevertheless, we’re talking about timing of the Sothic cycle in Censorinus’ case, not what it meant, and to who. It’s clear that a Sothic cycle DID exist, we ultimately just can’t be sure of WHEN it started, which casts doubt on any dating derived from it.

 On a different note, but maybe more irritating to me, is that we’re also left with questions about Sopdet/Sirius and whether its appearance purely marked Wp Rnpt (the “opening of the year”), or if festivities of the time were legitimately celebrating the Osirian mysteries, and not just, you know, Nile inundation.

There are references to Sothis/Sopdet as far back as the Old Kingdom pyramid texts (see 263 and 366, etc.) and she does play a role as psychopomp. The triad of Sopdet-Sah(u)-Sopdu can be paralleled to Isis-Osiris-Horus. But since Sopdet was not fully synchretized with Isis until the Ptolemaic period, I’m curious as to WHEN this framework of association came into play in earnest. (When I say, “I’m curious”, I mean it. If you know this information, contact me.) From our vantage point, in 2023, we’re looking back over a history where Hellenistic Isis mysteries have a foothold in the collective imagination. Even Censorinus would have had this reference point, living, as he was, in the waning years of classical antiquity.

The inspirational hook here is the democratization of this mythology at work, because from our POV, these mysteries can be for US, they are not just for kings. Our participation with the magic of resurrection is the real draw. But attempting to get into the minds of ancient celebrants of Wp Rnpt, and where their interests lay, while perhaps less flashy is actually just…really interesting. When they looked out on flooded fields, were ancient Egyptians thinking about the profundity of death and rebirth? Were they thinking about Isis’ sojourn into the underworld? Or were they (the “they” being predominantly farmers) thinking that they didn’t have to go into work that day? Cause, you know. The flooding.

 Was Wp Rnpt ever celebrated as MORE than a Nile flood festival precluded by the appearance of the star Sopdet after a 70 day disappearance? Did its associations with Isis and Osiris and fertility date to the Old Kingdom? Or did this magical mythology arrive in the waning years of the Late Period? Or is it purely a modern invention? For now, I only have speculation, a new JSTOR password, and a bone to pick with contemporary reductivists.