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139 One time, visiting the sites with a group of fans, I stood in the midst of a temple waving my hands as a traffic police- man; amazed onlookers wondered, “Who is this nut?,” but I was trying to point out to my group the fact that the Thebes temples, built by a succession of Pharaohs, kept changing their orientation (Fig. 63). It was Sir Norman Lockyer who, in the 1890s, first grasped the significance of this architec- tural aspect, giving rise to a discipline called Archaeoas- tronomy. Temples that were oriented to the equinoxes, like Solo- mon’s temple in Jerusalem, (Fig. 64) (and the old St. Peter’s basilica at the Vatican in Rome), faced permanently east, welcoming sunrise on equinox day year after year without reorientation. But temples oriented to the solstices, like Egypt’s temples in Thebes or China’s Temple of Heaven in Beijing, needed periodic reorientation because due to Pre- cession, where the Sun rises on solstice day shifts ever so lightly over the centuries—as can be illustrated by Stone- henge, where Lockyer applied his findings (see Fig. 6). The The Promised Land FIGURE 63