Thread: Ahhh. I always wandered why the Egyptian "Dog days" were located on the solar year at the hottest part of the year, the end of July, beginning of August...So I looked at the Ancient Egyptian dog breeds... 
I then found out about "Tesem", the Ancient Egyptian name for "hunting dog" which was written in hieroglyphics using the image of a prick-eared, leggy dog with a curled tail from the early Egyptian age...
There were three main types of dogs in Ancient Egypt: pariah dog (basenji), two kinds of greyhound-like dogs and a molosser-type dog....And the one shown on Tesem hieroglyph is definitely the "pariah dog" known in Egypt as basenji.
The "pariah dog" is the name given to the half wild dog species still found around the world. They are the closest we still have to the old wild dogs...And they have preserved one important characteristic of wild dogs: They have one breading season...
And guess when that breeding season starts? You guessed correctly. During dog days, end of July beginning of August, the hottest part of the year in the Northern hemisphere...Page from Princeton Canids of the world
For the Egyptians the sight of these doggies dogging was a very pleasing sight indeed. Not just because the Ancient Egyptians were old perverts, but because the start of the Basenji breeding season coincided with Nile flood maximum... oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2020/03/holy-c…
No wonder then that it is the Dog headed god Set who "defends Ra from the Serpent of Chaos Apep". The serpent is the symbol of sun's heat. And the dog days mark that maximum. After that the northern hemisphere starts cooling (the serpent is dying)... oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2019/04/apep.h…
Of course Set (Dog) is helped in his valiant fight against Apep (The Dragon) by Bastet (Lion, Cat). No wonder. Dog days fall in the middle of Leo...
And that's that...Oh almost forgot. The star Sirius just so happened to be rising around the same time...Hence it became The Dog Star...The star that rises when the Basenji dogs start mating...
Now does anyone else finds this totally amazing? And if you do, do you think that this will have any influence on Egyptology and our "understanding" of the Egyptian religion and mythology?
