In the reign of Khasekhemwy, a calendric calibration of great importance
was made and recorded on his monument.
That statue records a date of 479 years and 120 days,
i.e. 120 days are intercalated for the tropical year
in the 480th year ater 3117 BC (much as we insert leap years every 4 years).

April 18,
2638 BC
i.e. the year
- 2637

Running
Year 480

 Julian Date 758000
planetary conjunction of the Sun, Moon, and Jupiter
at the crossing of the ecliptic and the celestial equator.
 

  

In the reign of Khasekhem (Chasechem),
who thereafter apparently names himself Khasekhemwy,
a calendric calibration of great importance was made
and recorded on the base of the statue of Khasekhemwy.
That statue records a date of
479 years and 120 days,
a calendric monument to theintercalation of 120 days
in the 480th year ater 3117 BC

Sir Isaac Newton himself, the greatest of all astronomers
points to the solution. As Newton notes, the ancient Pharaohs were the first to introduce a solar 365-day year.

Duncan Steel, in Marking Time, John Wiley & Sons, N.Y., 2000,
writes at p. 39 that the Egyptians
"abandoned the lunar months in their 365-day calendar. This calendar had twelve months, each of 30 days precisely, and at the end of every year five supplementary, or epagomenal, days were included. In Latin this design was called the annus vagus, or "wandering year," because the solar year wandered relative to the Moon."

However, the Pharaohs were in 3117 BC not yet aware of the true 365.2422-day length of the true tropical year, which even we today generally round to 365.25 days for leap year intercalation every 4 years.

Using their 365-day calender, the Pharaohs would soon have noticed that the Seasons did not keep time with this 365-day figure and that a calendric correction had to be made as the centuries passed. This correction was made in the 480th year of the reign of Khasekhemwy.

Significant here is that it was the Pharaoh Khasekhemwy during whose reign the astronomical ceremony of pedj shes (stretching the cord) [< Indo-European, e.g. Latvian pedu stiep "to stretch the path"] is first attested on a granite block in Egypt. This method relied on sightings of the Great Bear and Orion ... constellations, using an "instrument of knowing" (merkhet) [Pharaonic merkhet < Indo-European e.g. Latvian merket, "to aim and measure"], which was similar in function to an astrolabe, and a sighting tool made from the central rib of a palm leaf, thus aligning the foundations of the pyramids and sun temples with the cardinal points.... British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, under "astronomy and astrology", p. 42.
 

  

Above: the Pharaoh Khasekhemwy (Chase-Sechemui)
Below is an enlargement of the script at his feet.

  

Below is an even greater enlargement of the number 479 written in "stick figures" FOUR long sticks, SEVEN middle sticks and NINE short sticks - all for "years"
These "sticks" are e.g. symbols of papyrus, etc.,
but only in later dynasties of fixed ordinal importance.
See the Pharaonic Numbers and the Heb-Sed feast.
The two circular whorls are later "hundreds"but here are "sixtys" as in the sexagesimal system and mean 120 "days".

  

The erring Egyptologists think their reading of 47209 for the above number is allegedly the number of dead in wars waged by Khasekhemwy due to "fallen" warriors inscribed around the foot of the stone statue! This is preposterous.
Even in the modern age, a Napoleon came to Africa with only 50,000 men as his entire army. As many a military historian has pointed out, there were far fewer people and smaller armies in ancient times. The fallen men shown on the statue are the dead years of the past.

The Egyptologists erroneously read the four notches as ten-thousands, and the number "Seven" as grouped in "3 and 4" as thousands, which may be correct for much later dynasties but not in the Old Kingdom.

At this early stage of writing, the ordinal decimal positions of the numbers were not fixed as later, but only dependent upon the RELATIVE POSITION of the symbol with respect to the other symbols. We find a similar phenomenon in the Egyptologists' erroneous reading
of  the Narmer Heb-Sed feasts.

The hieroglyphs (enlarged graph below) preceding the number 479
read GADU SAINI = Latvian "year bunches, i.e. year sums, years".

  

To commemorate his calendric discoveries
Khasekhemwy then created a shrine
incorporating the four cardinal points at the South End
and the lunar cycles of alternating 29 and 30 days
(20 rooms per side plus 9 + 1 in the middle) at the North End.
Included also were apparently the 33-year cycle
(which was also applicable to seasonal cycles of the Sun and Moon
- as in Muslim calendration - where "the months regress through
all the seasons every 32 1/2 years").

The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt writes as follows under Khasekhemwy, p. 150: "His tomb, nearly 70 m in length, is not only the last royal tomb in cemetery B at Umm el-Qa'ab but also the largest and most unusual. The substructure consists of a central corridor, flanked by thirty-three storerooms - see also Malia - for funerary offerings, leading to a stone-lined burial chamber which is then followed by a continuation of the corridor flanked by ten further magazines".

  

Khasekhemwy`s gigantic temple is like the ancient tombs
of the British Isles at about the same comparable historical period.
We also find this trapezoid form in Wayland´s Smithy in the Vale of the
White Horse, as also at Nazca, in all cases involving
the measurement of  the stars, moon  and or sun in some manner.

If one takes the length of rule - 253 - assigned by Manetho as the "sum" of the first dynasty, then the 479th year and April 18, 2638, BC is the end of the reign of Neferkeris. And only here does the Turin Canon of Kings first BEGIN to give a length of rule to its kings - lengths of rule which greatly depart from Manetho's "star" reigns but which follow the Egyptologists' dating of the rest of the Old Kingdom pharaohs, placing the end of the Old Kingdom ca. 2156 BC.

Manetho's list clearly lists star realms after this point. When we follow Manetho's lengths of "stellar" rule further, they place the end of the Old Kingdom at 1657 BC, i.e. 1460 years (a Sothic Year) later than 3116 BC. (With Nitokris this will be 1645 BC)

So why is the Turin Canon different? The so-called "lengths of rule" on the Turin Canon add up to the next 480-year period. Khasekhemwy is given a "lifetime" of 70 years on the Turin Papyrus and a rule of 25 years up to the 480th year. If we take that difference of 45 years and  add those 45 years to remaining "lengths of rule" of the remaining Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom, their sum is then 481.  The figures are
45 + 8 + 11 + 27 + 19 + 19 + 6 + 6 + 24 + 24 +23 + 8 +18 + 4
+ 2 +7 + 12 + 7 + 30 + 8 + 28 + 30 + 20 + 4 + 90 + 1 = 481
thereafter a break in the dynasty at Nitokris.

Hence, according to this analysis, it could be argued that the Old Kingdom began on December 25, 3117 BC and ended  480 + 480 years (960 years)  later, i.e. on ca. December 25, 2156 BC (the graphic below shows December 21, 2156 BC, i.e. (minus) - 2155, Julian Date 934298. But this would mean - after Khasekhemwy - that only the kings with a "length of rule" on the Turin Papyrus served as pharaohs, with the remainder of kings on Manetho's list representing "calendric star kings", who were given a stellar realm but who did not serve as pharaoh. Of course, as far as the actual "Kingdoms" were concerned, a Kingdom was actually 684 years, not 960 years. See Narmer

Go to Kings after Khasekhemwy