The age of the Hathor temple

Light of the pharaos...

In German speaking lands the idea of "electric lighting" was brought to a greater public by two austrian authors, Reinhard Habeck and Peter Krasa. I could not find any reference to them on any English website, so i believe that they play no role outside Austria/Gemany/Swiss. They even seem to have occupied the idea from a scandinavian author whose book I unfortunately could not get yet.
Because of the irrelevance of Krassa/Habeck in the rest of the world I will not bring my critique of their book here. But in the book they use some tricks do make the Hathor temple mysterious, that I have found on several English wep pages about Dendera, too. Therefore you can find these few examples here.

Age and insriptions

To make the Hathor temple mysterious enough it must be old. Very old, prehistoric if possible. Because we could hardly speak of an influence for pharaonic Egypt, if the first and only temple containing such pictures was from, lets say, about 50 B.C. Therefore the "lamp authors" declare the temple to be old. Their first piece of evidence: The "Zodiac of Dendera", located on top of the temple, is prehistoric! The zodiac is a kind of a small orrery, hewn into a rock, with a diameter of about 3 meters. When the orrery is prehistoric, the temple beneath must be much more prehistoric :-) simple. The ozodiac shows the constellations of the stars and the planets and is prehistoric, because "the represented constellations do not correspond with those of our time". But: Analyses of the zodiac made for example by the mathematical-astronomical section at the Goetheanum showed, that the zodiac does not represent an astronomically possible constellation, since for example Venus and Mercury are to each other in an astronomically impossible angle. It is therefore no real representation, but a symbolic overview of all planets and constellations which could be seen during the years!
By the way: The zodiac connot be prehistoric - it can be at its oldest from 332 B.C. Why? Because it shows the constellations in their Greek forms! Therefore it cannot be older than the year the Hellens conquered Egypt - 332 B.C.!

But the zodiac is not the only thing to be redated for the "higher purpose". To be old, the writings must be old, too, therefore we can read in Krassa/Habecks book:

It remained reserved for the French archaeologist Augusts Mariette to find in the middle of the 19th century in the crypts of Dendera [...] in yet completely unknown relief figures. Additionally they contained a hieroglyphic writing, which had only little in common with the well-known hieroglyphs on the rosetta stone. Hieroglyphics from an older epoch of old Egypt, which could not be dated exactly yet, whose decoding has now begun.

Anybody with even rudimentary knowledge of Hieroglyphics will now protest. Fact is: The old Egyptian writing consisted mostly of syllables. A hieroglyphic usually represents one consonant, which forms a syllable with a not represented vowel. The old writing got along therefore with relatively few characters. Beyond that there was a number of symbols, which contained several syllables (consonants), as well as a collection of "real" picture symbols and determinatives which should suggest, how a word is to be interpreted. All in all approximately 750 characters. At the beginning of Egypt history. All these characters are well-known and their interpretation undisputed.

Mouch later, more than thousand years after the end of the pyramid era, Egypt became the playball of its neighbours, who attacked, annxed and ruledd the country now and then. And all were fascinated by hieroglyphics and began to add own characters. At the time when Egypt was a Roman province, about the 8000 hieroglyphic symbols were used, some of them were found only in one or two reliefs or writings - to guess their meaning is very hard and often cause of great debate. The fact that the Dendera inscriptions are to be translated with difficulty, is therefore a sign for a relatively young age of the Dendera crypts!

Ob, by the way, I forgot. The age of the crypts can be determined even accurately. Krassa/Habeck were, as we can read in their book, about 4 hours inside the rooms and photographed any square cenimeter of the reliefs and inscriptions. So they must have stumbled over the "visiting card" of the owner, its name cartouche. In their book one can be seen on table 24: Ptolemeius XII. And he lived - around 50 B.C.! That was it with prehistoric. If one looks up what Thomas Schneider has written in his "Lexikon der Pharaonen" (Dictionary of the Pharaos) about Ptolemeius XII, we find:

The outstanding event of the building and religion policy P.s ' XII. is the inauguration of the Edfu temple on 7 February 70. In Dendera he begun in the year 54 B.C. with the construction work of the Hathor temple......

Still any questions?