Page 190 - Foundations

best data Frances Rolleston and others have to work from are the star catalogs provided by Arab
th
th
astronomers in the 9 and 15 centuries A.D.. It is hoped that the names of stars, their locations, and
the descriptions of the constellations they appear in have been accurately preserved for millennia, but
proving the matter is problematic. There are great gaps in the historical record.

The Dendera Planisphere, a representation of the stars in the heavens and the constellations that was
found in a 2,000 year old temple building in Egypt, promises a greater antiquity. The temple complex
is of much greater antiquity than the building the planisphere is located in (it is assumed the building
had been reconstructed around 50 B.C.). The planisphere itself depicts what the heavens would have
looked like approximately 2,700 years B.C.. This is much closer to the time of man’s creation, but
there are uncertainties present. Was the Dendera Zodiac accurately preserved over the millennia? Do
the images reflect knowledge of Egyptian astronomy in 50 B.C., or in 2,700 B.C.?

Dendera Zodiac

It is a massive undertaking to begin fact checking claims about what was understood in the past. An
example of how easy it is to err is found in Danny Faulkner’s critique of Frances Rolleston’s work.
He states:

The source of the drawing appears to be the Dendera planisphere, a stone star chart found in
Dendera, Egypt, which is about 2,000 years old (though at the time of Rolleston, Seiss, and
Bullinger, it was thought to be far older).

Faulkner suggests that Rolleston, Seiss, and Bullinger, who all lived in the 1800s, thought that the
Dendera Zodiac was of much greater antiquity than scholars now date it to be (50 B.C.). Faulkner
evidently was not aware of the biographical work on Frances Rolleston’s life, being acquainted only
with her book Mazzaroth. In the writing Letters of Frances Rolleston of Keswick, the following
statement is made by Rolleston in one of her letters.