DEATH OF THE GODS

“Barleycorn, of course, eventually became a unit of linear measurement, rather than time, as any dictionary reveals. One barleycorn was equal to 1/3 of an inch. But it seems abundantly clear that it started out as a measure of time.... “It will be recalled that Osiris was a god of the harvest and was said to have taught early man when and how to cultivate the grain from which the early Egyptians made their beer. “Early man built his worldview upon time; his universe was derived from the apparent revolutions of the stars, and as de Santillana wrote: “‘...for those forebears did not only build up time into a structure , ‘cyclic time’: along with it came their creative idea of Number as the secret of things . When they said ‘things are numbers’, they swept in an immense arc over the whole field of ideas, astronomical and mathematical, from which real science was going to be born.’ “To reiterate, it is hard to believe that the division of the celestial circle into 360 parts was not done very early . Since the Egyptians divided up the circle of the heavens into parts of 10, leading to 36 parts and 36 decans, and also devised a civil calendar with 360 days (with 5 added), it must have originally been hoped that the circle and the calendar would have the same measurement.” P. 212-214, “The Discovery of Barleycorn, The Framework of Time,” THE DEATH OF THE GODS IN ANCIENT EGYPT (1992) by Jane B. Sellers.