What did our ancestors think when they looked at the night sky? All cultures have assigned special meaning to the Sun and Moon, but what about the pearly band of light and shadow we call the Milky Way?
My latest research has shown an intriguing connection between the Egyptian goddess and the Milky Way.
Scholars are slowly building a picture of Egyptian astronomy. The god Shah is associated with the stars in the constellation Orion, and the goddess Sopdet is associated with the star Sirius. Where we see a plough (or digger), the Egyptians saw the foreleg of a bull. However, the name of the Milky Way in Egypt and its relationship with Egyptian culture remained a mystery for a long time.
Many scientists have suggested that the Milky Way is connected to the Egyptian sky goddess Nut, who swallowed the Sun as it set and gave birth to it once again as it rose the next day. But attempts to map different parts of Nut’s body to parts of the Milky Way were inconsistent with each other and did not match ancient Egyptian texts.
In a paper published in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, I compared descriptions of the goddess in the Pyramid Texts, Casket Texts, and Book of Nuts with simulations of the Milky Way’s appearance in the ancient Egyptian night sky.
Carved into the walls of pyramids more than 4,000 years ago, the Pyramid Texts are a collection of spells to aid kings in their journey to the afterlife. The Coffin Texts, painted on coffins several hundred years after the age of the pyramids, were a similar collection of spells. The Book of Nut described Nut’s role in the solar cycle. It has been found in various monuments and papyri, and the oldest version dates back approximately 3000 years.
The Book of Nut described Nut’s head and crotch as the western and eastern horizons, respectively. It also described how it swallowed not only the Sun but also a series of so-called “decanal” stars, thought to be used to tell the time at night.
From this description I conclude that Nut’s head and groin must have been locked to the horizons so that she could give birth and then swallow the decanal stars as they rose and set throughout the night. This meant that the Milky Way, with its different parts also rising and setting, could never be directly mapped.
However, I found a possible connection with the Milky Way in the direction of Nut’s arms. The Book of Nut describes Nut’s right arm reaching to the northwest and her left arm reaching to the southeast, at a 45-degree angle to her body. My simulations of the Egyptian night sky using the Cartes du Ciel and Stellarium planetarium software revealed that this orientation was exactly the orientation of the Milky Way during winter in ancient Egypt.
The Milky Way is not a physical manifestation of Nut. Instead, it may have been used as a metaphorical way to emphasize Nut’s presence in the sky.
It showed Nut’s arms during the winter months. He sketched the spine of the Milky Way in summer (when its orientation changed by 90 degrees). Nut is often depicted as a naked, arched woman in tomb murals and funerary papyri; This is a depiction that resembles the arch of the Milky Way.
However, Nut is also depicted as a cow, a hippo, and a vulture in ancient texts, and is thought to emphasize her maternal qualities. Likewise, the Milky Way can be thought of as emphasizing Nut’s celestial qualities.
Ancient Egyptian texts also describe Nut as a ladder, or as a person who stretches out her arms to help the deceased ascend into the sky on their way to the afterlife. Many cultures around the world, such as the Lakota and Pawnee in North America and the Quiché Maya in Central America, regard the Milky Way as the path of spirits.
The Book of Nut also describes the annual bird migration to Egypt and connects this to both the underworld and Nut. This section of the Hazelnut Book explains: Ba The birds flying to Egypt from the northeast and northwest directions of Nut turn into ordinary birds feeding in the swamps of Egypt. Egyptians evaluated this BaDepicted as a bird with a human head, it is an aspect of a person that imbues him/her with individuality (similar, but not identical, to the modern Western concept of “soul”).
Head Most of the dead were free to leave and return to the land of the dead as they wished. Hazelnut is often shown standing in a plane tree and providing food and water to the deceased and their relatives. Ba.
Once again, various cultures in the Baltics and Northern Europe (including Finns, Lithuanians, and Sámi) view the Milky Way as the path along which birds migrate before winter. While these connections do not prove a connection between Nut and the Milky Way, they do suggest that such a connection would place Nut comfortably within the global mythology of the Milky Way.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Or Graur does not work for, consult for, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond his academic duties.