by What did our ancestors think when they looked up at the night sky? Every culture has given a special meaning to the Sun and the Moon, but what about the pearly band of light and shadow we call the Milky Way?
My recent study revealed an interesting connection between an Egyptian goddess and the Milky Way.
Slowly, students are putting together a picture of Egyptian astronomy. The god Sah is linked to stars in the constellation Orion, and the goddess Sopdet is linked to the star Sirius. Where we see a plow (or the great blacksmith), the Egyptians saw the overlay of a bull. But the Egyptian name of the Milky Way and its relationship to Egyptian culture have long been a mystery.
Some scholars have suggested that the Milky Way was linked to Nut, the Egyptian goddess of the sky who swallowed the Sun as she slept and was reborn as he rose the next day. But their attempts to map different parts of Nut’s body onto parts of the Milky Way were inconsistent with each other and did not match the 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, Coffin Texts, and Nut Book with simulations of the appearance of the Milky Way in the ancient Egyptian night sky.
Carved on the walls of the pyramids more than 4,000 years ago, the Pyramid Texts are a collection of spells to aid kings in their journey to the afterlife. Painted on coffins a few centuries after the age of the pyramids, the Coffin Texts were a similar collection of spells. The Nut Book described Nut’s role in the solar cycle. It is found in several monuments and papyri, and the oldest version dates back to around 3,000 years ago.
The Nut Book described the head and sun of Nut as the western and eastern horizons, respectively. He also described how she swallowed not only the Sun but also a series of so-called “decanal” stars which are thought to have been used to tell time during the night.
From this description, I concluded that Nut’s head and groin had to be locked to the sky so that she could give birth and then swallow the double channel stars as they rose and they disappeared for the night. This meant that it could never be directly mapped onto the Milky Way, whose various parts also rise and set.
I did, however, find a possible connection to the Milky Way in the orientation of Nut’s arms. The Book of Nut describes Nut’s right hand as being in the north-west and his left in the south-east at a 45 degree angle to his 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 the winter in ancient Egypt.
The Milky Way is not a physical manifestation of a Nut. Instead, it may have been used as a figurative way to highlight Nut’s presence as the sky.
During the winter, he showed the arms of Nut. During the summer (when its orientation goes 90 degrees) the Milky Way outlines its backbone. A nut is often depicted in tomb murals and funerary papyri as a naked, arched woman, a depiction that resembles the arch of the Milky Way.
However, a nut is also depicted in ancient texts as a cow, hippopotamus and vulture, which is thought to highlight her maternal qualities. In the same way, the Milky Way could be thought of as highlighting the heavenly qualities of Nut.
Ancient Egyptian texts also describe Nut as a ladder or outstretched hand to help guide the deceased up to 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, see the Milky Way as a road of spirits.
The Nut Book also describes the annual migration of birds into Egypt and connects it to the nether world and the Nut. This section of the Nut Book describes It was birds flying into Egypt from the north-east and north-west of Nut before regular birds turn in to feed in the marshes of Egypt. The Egyptians considered the It wasdepicted as a human-headed bird, to be the aspect of a person who insisted on individuality (similar, but not identical, to the modern Western concept of the “soul”).
The IS Bass the dead were free to leave and return to the nether world as they wished. A nut is often depicted standing in a sycamore tree and providing food and water for the deceased and his two It was.
Again, many cultures across the Baltics and northern Europe (including the Finns, Lithuanians and Sami) see the Milky Way as the path along which birds migrate before winter. Although these links do not establish a connection between Nut and the Milky Way, they do indicate that such a connection would place Nut comfortably within the global mythology of the Milky Way.
This article from The Conversation is republished under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Or Graur does not work for, consult with, or hold shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this section, and has not disclosed any relevant affiliations subsequent to his academic appointment.
