During the last four years, the Egyptian-Spanish Mission on Egyptian Archaeoastronomy, conducted under the auspices of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, has been carrying out an ambitious scientific project with the aim of studying the cosmovision of the ancient civilization of the pharaohs. Part of the project consists of a re-analysis of the iconographic and historical sources that has allowed, among other things, a reassessment of the calendar theory, 1 a challenge to old fashioned paradigms, 2 and a new proposal for the sky-maps of ancient Egypt. 3 However, the most expensive part of the project, in time, effort and resources, has been the five campaigns devoted so far to measuring the orientation and studying the spatial location of ancient monuments across the Nile Valley and beyond. More than 500 pyramids, hypogea, chapels, sanctuaries, and temples small and large have been measured so far. The fieldwork in successive campaigns was organized geographically, but also with the intention of testing previous results. Accordingly, the first campaign was devoted mainly to Upper Egypt, the second to Middle Egypt, the third to the Oases of the Western Desert, and the fourth to Lower Egypt. Three papers 4 on the temples (hereafter Papers 1, 2 and 3) have been published in this journal, in which, stage by stage, we have analysed the relation of the temple orientations to their location within the local landscape, understanding 'landscape' in its broadest meaning of both terrestrial and celestial aspects. Our studies demonstrate that both components were necessary and indeed intimately correlated. 5 However, in previous campaigns, we did not measure certain temples that were located away from the standard circuits or at difficult locations, or of whose existence we had been unaware. 6 A new campaign was therefore necessary to complete our sample. Figure 1 shows the location of the sites where the data presented in this paper were assembled. As shown in Figure 2, here we will also study monuments that we measured earlier, such as Serabit el Khadim, but which we did not discuss in previous papers.The majority of the new monuments that we will discuss in this paper are in a poor state of preservation. We therefore do not seek alignments of high precision, but we aim rather to obtain a statistically significant sample of monuments. Accordingly, we once again used a high precision compass (corrected for local magnetic declination 7 ), and a clinometer, either as separate instruments or enclosed within a single tandem device. This is likely to result in an error close to ½º in both azimuth JHA, xxxix (2008)

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In a series of papers published in this journal in recent years, some of the authors, members of the Egyptian-Spanish Mission for the Archaeoastronomy of Ancient Egypt, have made a number of interesting discoveries relating to the way in which the ancient Egyptians might have orientated their sacred buildings.1 In Paper 4, the last of the papers and an overview, a simple theory was postulated, 2 according to which a series of facts were established that clearly connect temple orientation to the local landscape, landscape being understood to include both the earth and the sky. Hence simple astronomical patterns or families were basically defined in relation to the stations of the sun (solstitial, equinoctial or seasonal, notably New Year's Eve or Wepet Renpet), 3 the brightest stars of the Egyptian skies (notably Sirius, ancient Egyptian Sopdet) and the cardinal directions. On several occasions, these patterns were in agreement with local topographic landmarks such as the course of the Nile. We considered our sample of 330 alignments to be statistically representative beyond doubt, and we were convinced that new data would serve only to reinforce (or slightly modify) our results. The moment has now arrived to attempt to falsify this statement.Two experiments have been selected with this purpose. On the one hand, a new campaign, the sixth, was conducted in Egypt in December 2008 at the few temples of Middle Egypt and the Oasis of Fayum (see Figure 1) that for various reasons could not be measured in previous campaigns. 4 The idea was to complete the sample of Egyptian temples almost to exhaustion. On the other hand, a completely new experiment was designed using temples in Sudan. Data were obtained from high-resolution images of Google Earth, covering a vast area of the country (but not all of it), and, in those sectors where high-resolution images were not available, from good quality maps derived from the specialist literature. The idea in this case was to carry out a significant test of our theories with a completely independent set of temples -independent not only from the geographical point of view, but also because most of them belong to an independent culture, the Kingdom of Kush, although this was admittedly heavily influenced by Egyptian schemes and traditions. 5As in previous reports, we wish to stress clearly that we are not seeking alignments of extreme precision, but we aim rather to obtain a statistically significant sample of monuments where we can perform our archaeoastronomical analysis. Bearing this is mind, we made our own fieldwork measurements using a high precision compass JHA, xli (2010)

The minor step pyramids (MSPs) form a coherent group of seven monuments distributed along Egyptian geography with a series of common characteristics that make them unique and distinct from other buildings of similar typology. The purpose of these pyramids is a matter of dispute among Egyptologists and most proposals could be interpreted as sad examples of vox nihil. By contrast, our archaeoastronomical study of the monuments would suggest that minor step pyramids were built at certain locations and with particular orientations that might relate them to the preliminary stages and consolidation, during the reign of king Snefru, of two master creations of early dynastic Egypt, the civil calendar and the stellar Afterlife later appearing in the Pyramid Texts.