What did our ancestors assume once they seemed up on the night time sky? All cultures ascribed particular that means to the Solar and the Moon, however what concerning the pearly band of sunshine and shadow we name the Milky Means?
My current examine confirmed an intriguing hyperlink between an Egyptian goddess and the Milky Means.
Slowly, students are placing collectively an image of Egyptian astronomy. The god Sah has been linked to stars within the Orion constellation, whereas the goddess Sopdet has been linked to the star Sirius. The place we see a plough (or the large dipper), the Egyptians noticed the foreleg of a bull. However the Milky Means’s Egyptian identify and its relation to Egyptian tradition have lengthy been a thriller.
A number of students have instructed that the Milky Means was linked to Nut, the Egyptian goddess of the sky who swallowed the Solar because it set and gave start to it as soon as extra because it rose the subsequent day. However their makes an attempt to map completely different elements of Nut’s physique onto sections of the Milky Means had been inconsistent with one another and didn’t match the traditional Egyptian texts.
In a paper printed within the Journal of Astronomical Historical past and Heritage, I in contrast descriptions of the goddess within the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, and the E-book of Nut to simulations of the Milky Means’s look within the historical Egyptian night time sky.
Carved onto the partitions of the pyramids greater than 4,000 years in the past, the Pyramid Texts are a group of spells to help the kings’ journey to the afterlife. Painted on coffins just a few hundred years after the age of the pyramids, the Coffin Texts had been an identical assortment of spells. The E-book of Nut described Nut’s position within the photo voltaic cycle. It has been present in a number of monuments and papyri, and its oldest model dates again some 3,000 years in the past.
The E-book of Nut described Nut’s head and groin because the western and japanese horizons, respectively. It additionally described how she swallowed not solely the Solar but in addition a sequence of so-called “decanal” stars which can be thought to have been used to inform time in the course of the night time.
From this description, I concluded that Nut’s head and groin needed to be locked to the horizons in order that she might give start and later swallow the decanal stars as they rose and set all through the night time. This meant that she might by no means be mapped immediately onto the Milky Means, whose completely different sections rise and set as effectively.
I did, nevertheless, discover a attainable hyperlink to the Milky Means within the orientation of Nut’s arms. The E-book of Nut describes Nut’s proper arm as mendacity within the northwest and her left arm within the southeast at a forty five diploma angle to her physique. My simulations of the Egyptian night time sky utilizing the planetarium software program Cartes du Ciel and Stellarium revealed that this orientation was exactly that of the Milky Means in the course of the winter in historical Egypt.
The Milky Means will not be a bodily manifestation of Nut. As an alternative, it could have been used as a figurative option to spotlight Nut’s presence because the sky.
Through the winter, it confirmed Nut’s arms. In the summertime (when its orientation flips by 90 levels) the Milky Means sketched out her spine. Nut is commonly portrayed in tomb murals and funerary papyri as a unadorned, arched lady, a portrayal that resembles the arch of the Milky Means.
Nonetheless, Nut is additionally portrayed in historical texts as a cow, a hippopotamus and a vulture, thought to spotlight her motherly attributes. Alongside the identical strains, the Milky Means could possibly be regarded as highlighting Nut’s celestial attributes.
The traditional Egyptian texts additionally describe Nut as a ladder or as reaching out her arms to assist information the deceased as much as the sky on their option to the afterlife. Many cultures all over the world, such because the Lakota and Pawnee in North America and the Quiché Maya in Central America, see the Milky Means as a spirits’ street.
The E-book of Nut additionally describes the annual fowl migration into Egypt and ties it each to the netherworld and to Nut. This part of the E-book of Nut describes Ba birds flying into Egypt from Nut’s northeast and northwest sides earlier than turning into common birds to feed in Egypt’s marshes. The Egyptians thought of the Ba, portrayed as a human-headed fowl, to be the facet of an individual that imbued it with individuality (comparable, however not similar, to the trendy Western idea of the “soul”).
The Bas of the useless had been free to depart and return to the netherworld as they wished. Nut is commonly proven standing in a sycamore tree and offering meals and water to the deceased and their Ba.
As soon as once more, a number of cultures throughout the Baltics and northern Europe (together with the Finns, Lithuanians, and Sámi) view the Milky Means as the trail alongside which birds migrate earlier than winter. Whereas these hyperlinks don’t show a connection between Nut and the Milky Means, they present that such a connection would place Nut comfortably inside the world mythology of the Milky Means.
Or Graur, Affiliate Professor of Astrophysics, College of Portsmouth
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