This article was originally published at The conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com Expert Voices: Comments and Insights.
Or Graur is Associate Professor of Astrophysics at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, Honorary Associate Professor at University College London (UCL), and Research Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History.
What did our ancestors think when they looked up? night sky? All cultures attached special importance to it The sun And the moonbut what about the pearly band of light and shadow that we call this? Milky Way?
My recent study showed a fascinating connection between an Egyptian goddess and the Milky Way.
The scientists are slowly getting together an image of Egyptian astronomy. The god Sah was associated with stars Orion constellationwhile the goddess Sopdet was associated with the star Sirius. Where we see a plow (or the big car), the Egyptians saw the front leg of a bull. But the Egyptian name of the Milky Way and its relationship to Egyptian culture have long been a mystery.
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Several scholars have suggested that the Milky Way was connected to Nut, the Egyptian sky goddess who swallowed the sun as it set and gave birth to it again as it rose the next day. However, their attempts to map different parts of Nut’s body onto sections of the Milky Way were inconsistent and did not match the ancient Egyptian texts.
In an article published in the Journal of Astronomical History and HeritageI have compared descriptions of the goddess in the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Textsand the Book of the Nut to simulations of the appearance of the Milky Way in the ancient Egyptian night sky.
Carved into the walls of the pyramids more than 4,000 years ago, the Pyramid Texts are a collection of spells designed to aid kings on 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 Nut described Nut’s role in the Solar cycle. It has been found in several monuments and papyri and its oldest version dates back to around 3,000 years ago.
The Book of Nut described Nut’s head and groin as the western and eastern horizons respectively. It also described how she swallowed not only the sun but also a number of so-called “decanal stars”. these are thoughts have been used for telling Time during the night.
From this description I concluded that Nut’s head and groin needed to be tied to the horizon so that she could give birth and later swallow the deanery Stars how they rose and set throughout the night. This meant that it could never be directly mapped onto the Milky Way, its various sections rise and fall as well as.
However, I found a possible connection to the Milky Way in the orientation of Nut’s arms. The Book of Nut describes Nut’s right arm as lying to the northwest and her left arm to the southeast at a 45 degree angle to her body. My simulations of the Egyptian night sky using the planetarium software Cartes du Ciel And Stellarium revealed that this orientation corresponded exactly to that of the Milky Way in winter in ancient Egypt.
The Milky Way is not a physical manifestation of Nut. Instead, it may have been used as a figurative way to highlight Nut’s presence as Heaven.
In winter, Nut’s arms could be seen on it. In summer (when its orientation rotates 90 degrees), the Milky Way traces its backbone. Nut is often depicted in tomb paintings and funerary papyri as a nude, arched woman, a depiction that resembles the arc of the Milky Way.
However, Nut is also shown depicted in ancient texts as a cow, hippopotamus and vulture to emphasize their maternal characteristics. In this sense, one could imagine that the Milky Way highlights Nut’s celestial properties.
The ancient Egyptian texts also describe Nut as a ladder or a woman who stretches out her arms to guide the deceased to heaven on the 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, consider the Milky Way to be one Path of the spirits.
The Book of Nut also describes the annual migration of birds to Egypt and associates it with both the underworld and Nut. This section of the book describes Nut Ba Birds fly into Egypt from Nut’s northeast and northwest sides before transforming into normal birds to feed in the swamplands of Egypt. The Egyptians looked at this Badepicted as a human-headed bird, is said to be the aspect of a person that gave him individuality (similar, but not identical, to the modern Western concept of “soul”).
The Bas The dead had the freedom to leave the underworld and return to it as they wished. Nuss is often depicted standing in a sycamore tree, where she provides food and water to the deceased and their relatives Ba.
Again, several cultures in the Baltics and Northern Europe (including the Finns, Lithuanians and Sámi) consider the Milky Way to be the route by which birds migrate before winter. While these connections do not prove a connection between Nut and the Milky Way, they do show that such a connection could conveniently place Nut in the global Mythology of the Milky Way.