Modern science confirms the bold guesses of a forgotten 18th-century Egyptologist about the prehistoric past of the Nile Valley. How was it possible to foresee the achievements of archaeology more than a couple of centuries in advance? This can be explained by the first astronomers and the records of the folklore tradition of prehistoric Egypt, which were preserved by the ancient priests.
Memory depth
Ancient authors (Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Manetho, Diogenes Laertius), referring to Egyptian priests, wrote about the enormous depth of Egyptian chronicles, spanning tens of thousands of years. Hitherto such a huge time span is considered fictitious.
However, the modern archaeology operates with dates of the same order. About 38,000 BC the anatomically modern carriers of the Aterian stone industry from Morocco and Algeria migrated in Lower Egypt and Levant (Garcea 2012). These migrants settled in the Low Egypt and contributed to local folklore with the motif of the western land Duat of dead, i.e., ancestors. To this day, there is a region Tuat of oases in central Algeria, from which the Aterians began their migration to the Nile Valley. This correspondence no longer seems impossible, given the practice of modern folklore studies.
In particular, the name "Seven Sisters" of the Pleiades asterism among the aborigines of Australia, the American Indians, and the native population of Siberia as well as the ancient Mediterranean was interpreted as an indication of a Paleolithic folklore preceding the settlement of Australia (~60,000 BC) and America (Frolov 1977). Analogous folklore correspondences were studied in the course of a special project of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project 04-06-80238) and the Russian Academy of Sciences. This detailed analysis of the electronic “Catalog of folklore and mythological motifs” (35 thousand abstracts) traced the ways of Paleolithic migrations in America and Australia revealing the "myths of extreme antiquity" (Beriozkin, 2005).
These findings were independently confirmed by phylogenetic analysis (D'Huy 2016). The phenomenon of myths of extreme antiquity were confirmed by geological methods and summarized in the book “The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World” by Patrick Nunn (2018).
However, the multi-thousand-year tradition of chronicling in Ancient Egypt required special methods of counting time over a huge interval.
Great Year in native historiography
Relics of Paleolithic folklore are also noticeable in Ancient Egypt, which was distinguished by extreme conservatism. Thus, the Byzantine monk George Syncellus (early 9th century) describes the Egyptian "Old Chronicle" allegedly covering 36,525 years. It is easy to see that the time indicated is a hundredfold of the number of days in a year of the Julian calendar. Moreover, the authentic Egyptian “Turin King List” from the time of Ramses II contains an estimate of the total number of reigns at 36,620 years. This is again a hundredfold number of days, but sidereal days, in a year.
A comparison between the “Turin King List” and the "Old Chronicle" shows that Egyptians, to describe their history, placed it in one conventional Great Year, in which one day was equal to 100 human years (or a life). A similar technique is sometimes used now, when the geological and biological history of the Earth is compressed from the difficult-to-imagine billions of years to one conventional year (Fig. 1). This method makes it easier to imagine and remember the sequence of events over a large period of time in terms of the calendar of one conventional year. Attempts of reverse transition from the imaginary year to the real calendar gave different results due to differences in the assumed type of a day.
In practice, the length of the Great Year roughly corresponds to the time of Aterian migration in the Low Egypt. Probably, the idea of Great Year was generated among these migrants or their descendants.