Page Content (OCR)
15 began on the day of the Spring Equinox and it has so re- mained in the ensuing calendars of the ancient Near East. That determined the time of the most important festival of the year—the New Year festival, an event that lasted ten days, during which detailed and canonized rituals had to be followed. Determining calendrical time by Heliacal Rising entailed the observation of the skies at dawn, when the sun just be- gins to rise on the eastern horizon but the skies are still dark enough to show the stars in the background. The day of the equinox having been determined by the fact that on it day- light and nighttime were precisely equal, the position of the sun at heliacal rising was then marked by the erection of a stone pillar to guide future observations—a procedure that was followed, for example, later on at Stonehenge in Britain; and, as at Stonehenge, long-term observations revealed that the group of stars (“constellation”) in the background has not remained the same (Fig. 6); there, the alignment stone called the “Heel Stone” that points to sunrise on solstice day The Messianic Clock FIGURE 6