The reform intended by the Canopus Decree did not take root because the people and the conservatives among the priests kept faith with Venus and observed the New Year and other festivals on the days regulated by it. As a matter of fact, we know that the Ptolemaic pharaohs were obliged to swear in the temple of Isis (Venus) that they would not reform the calendar, nor add a day every four years. Julius Caesar actually followed the Canopus Decree by fixing a calendar of 365/4 days. In —26 Augustus introduced the Julian year in Alexandria, but the Egyptians outside Alexandria still continued to observe the Venus year of 365 days, and Claudius Ptolemy, the Alexandrian astronomer of the second Christian century, wrote in his Almagest: "Eight Egyptian years without a sensible error equal five circlings of Venus." 3
As this period of eight years can be divided in two, each part being
1 Pliny, Natural History, ii. 37.
2 S. Scharpe, The Decree of Canopus in Hieroglyphics and Greek (1870).
3 Bk. X. Chan. iv.
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equal to two and a half synodical periods, the dividing point being alternately at a heliacal (simultaneous with the sun) rising or setting of Venus, the Egyptians of the second half of the last millennium before the present era observed a four-year cycle. This is the meaning of Horapollo's information that the Egyptian year is equal to four years.4 In like manner the Greeks counted by four-year cycles dedicated to Athene: the Olympic games took place every fourth year (in the beginning, every eighth year5), and time was reckoned by the Olympiads. The Olympic games were started in the eighth century. At the Parthenon in Athens every fourth year was celebrated by the Pan-athenaic processions in honor of Athene.
The Incas of Peru in South America and the Mayas and Toltecs in Central America observed the synodical revolution of Venus and the Venus year in addition to the solar year.6 They also calculated by groups of five Venus years equal to eight years of 365 days. Like the Egyptians robin-bobin
and the Greeks, the Mayas observed the four-year cycles,7 from the inferior to the superior and from the superior to the inferior conjunctions of Venus. The Incas correctly marked the Venus calendar by tying knots in their quipus,8 and the Mayas, in the Dresden Codex, correctly gave the length of the Venus synodical cycle as 584 days.9 The astronomical observations of the Mayas were so precise that in computing the solar year, they arrived at figures not only more accurate than the Julian year, but also more accurate than the Gregorian year, introduced in Europe in 1582, ninety years after the discovery of America, which is our calendar year today.10
All this proves that the Venus calendar preserved its religious significance for a long time, down to the end of the Middle Ages and
4 A. T. Cory, The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo Nilous (1840), II, Ixxxix. See also Wilkinson in G. Rawlinson, The History of Herodotus, II, 285. 8 E. N. Gardiner, Olympia (1925), p. 71; Farnell. The Cults of the Greek States, IV, 293; Frazer, The Dying God (1911), p. 78.
6 Brasseur, Sources de I'histoire primitive du Mexique, p. 27.
7 J. E. Thompson, "A Correlation of the Mayan and European Calendars," Field Museum of Natural History Anthropological Series, Vol. XVII.
8 Nordenskiold, The Secret of the Peruvian Quipus, II, 35.
• W. Gates, The Dresden Codex, Maya Society Publication No. 2 (1932). 10 Gates in De Landa, Yucatan, p. 60.
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the discovery of America, and even thereafter, but that already in the eighth century before the present era an eight or double four-year cycle of Venus was observed in time reckoning and therefore must have been established in the celestial sphere.
A few decades after the discovery of America, the Augustinian friar Ramon y Zamora wrote that the Mexican tribes held the Morning Star in great veneration and kept a precise record of its appearance: "So exact was the book-record of the day when it appeared and when it concealed itself, that they never made mistakes." u
This was a very old custom originating in a past when Venus moved on an elongated orbit.
The movements of Venus were carefully watched by the ancient astronomers of Mexico, India, Iran, and Babylonia. Temple observatories for the cult of the planets were built in both hemispheres. The bamot or "high places" so often mentioned in the Scriptures were observatories as well as places for offerings to the planet-gods, chiefly Venus (Baal). On these high places idolatrous priests, ordained by the erring kings of Judah, burned incense to Baal, to the sun, and the moon, and to the planets.12
In the second half of the second millennium and in the beginning of the first millennium, Venus was still a comet; and though a comet can have a circular orbit—there is such a comet in the solar system 13 —Venus was not then moving on a circular orbit as it does now; its orbit crossed the orbit of the earth and endangered it every fifty years. Since, by the second half of the eighth century before the present era, Venus' cycle was similar to what it is today, it follows that some time before then Venus must have changed its orbit and achieved its present circular path between Mercury and the earth and become the Morning and Evening Star.
The irregularities in the movements of Venus must have been observed by the ancients; the data in the ancient records must differ
11 Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, I, 624. 12 II Kings 23 : 5.
13 The Schwassmann-Wachmann comet, the orbit of which is between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn.
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very much from the figures on Venus' movements given at the head of this section.
Venus Moves Irregularly
In the library of Assurbanipal in Nineveh were stored astronomical books of his and of previous ages; in the ruins of this library Sir Henry Layard found the Venus tablets.1
robin-bobin
There arose the question: From what period do the observations of these tablets date?
Schiaparelli investigated this problem and "as an example of method his work is excellent." 2 He decided that "the inquiry could be limited to the seventh and eighth centuries."
The year-formula of an early king, Ammizaduga, was discovered on one of the tablets, and since then the tablets are usually ascribed to the first Babylonian dynasty; however, a scholar has offered evidence to the effect that the year-formula of Ammizaduga was inserted by a scribe in the seventh century.3 (If the tablets originated in the beginning of the second millennium, they would prove only that Venus was even then an errant comet.)
Following are a few excerpts from the Venus tablets:
"On the 11th of Sivan, Venus disappeared in the west, remaining absent in the sky for 9 months and 4 days, and on the 15th of Adar she was seen in the east."
The next year, "on the 10th of Arahsamna, Venus disappeared in the east, remaining absent 2
months and 6 days in the sky, and was seen on the 16th of Tebit in the west."
The following year Venus disappeared in the west on the 26th of
1 Published by H. C. Rawlinson and G. Smith, Table of the Movements of tht Planet Venus and Their Influences. Sayce's translation was printed in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 1874; a more recent translation by S. Langdon and J. K. Fotheringham was published as The Venus Tablets of Ammizaduga (1928).
2 Fotheringham in Langdon and Fotheringham, The Venus Tablets of Ammizaduga, p. 32. See Schiaparelli, "Venusbeobachtungen und Berechnungen der Babylonier," Das Weltall, Vols. VI, VII.
3 Kugler ascribed the Venus tablets to the first Babylonian Dynasty, because he read a year-formula of Ammizaduga in one of them. In 1920, F. Hommel (Assyriologische Bibliothek, XXV, 197-199) declared that the year-formula of Ammizaduga was inserted into the Venus tablets by a scribe in the reign of Assurbanipal, in the seventh century.