Sky Cultures 01

Before the Greeks

The zodiac is Babylonian, the 24-hour day is Egyptian, and both were worked out by people watching this part of the winter sky.

Working out when this is best placed from where you are…

Latitude

Longitude

Which night

Date

Hour

Used for this lesson only — your map settings, and every other lesson, stay as they are.

Sources

HYG stellar database v4.2 — star positions, magnitudes and every separation quoted here
Hunger & Pingree, MUL.APIN: An Astronomical Compendium in Cuneiform, AfO Beiheft 24 (1989)
Rogers, "Origins of the ancient constellations: I. The Mesopotamian traditions", JBAA 108, 9 (1998)
Neugebauer & Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts, vol. I: The Early Decans (Brown University Press, 1960)
Censorinus, De Die Natali 18 and 21 (238 CE) — the Sothic year and the coincidence of 139 CE
Herodotus, Histories 2.86 — the seventy days of embalming
Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (SBL, 2005) — Sah, Sopdet and the Imperishable Stars

← GUIDES

This is Orion, and around 1000 BCE it was already the True Shepherd of Anu, the sky god — with Betelgeuse and Rigel in it, as they are in ours. It is named in MUL.APIN, a Mesopotamian compendium called after its first words: some seventy stars and figures, which rise together, and when. The oldest dated copy was written on clay in 686 BCE.

MUL.APIN also names the seventeen figures in the path of the Moon — the band every planet keeps to. The list starts here: first the Stars, which is what they called the Pleiades, then the Bull of Heaven, whose jaw is the V of the Hyades with Aldebaran at its tip. The Bull is the one Gilgamesh and Enkidu killed. It was already old when this was written.

By about 400 BCE the Moon's path had been cut into twelve equal signs of 30° — the first zodiac — and most of its figures are ones you know. Castor and Pollux were the Great Twins; Regulus, in the Great Lion, was the King, as its Latin name, "little king", still says. Virgo was the Furrow, and its bright star, below the horizon now, is still Spica: an ear of grain.

One sign changed animal on the way. The figure at Hamal and Sheratan was the Hired Man, a farm labourer, and it reached the Greeks as the Ram. Nobody knows quite how; a scribal pun is the favourite guess. The Scorpion and the Goat-Fish crossed over unchanged, and when astrologers today say "Capricorn" they are using a figure that was carved on Babylonian boundary stones.

Back to Orion. In Egypt it was Sah, bound up with Osiris, and the star its Belt points to — Sirius — was Sopdet, identified with Isis. In the Pyramid Texts, carved inside royal tombs from about 2350 BCE, the dead king is reborn into the sky with Sah, and Sopdet is named alongside him. The brightest star of the night was part of a funeral.

Every year Sirius vanishes into the Sun's glare for about 70 days, then reappears one dawn in the east — its heliacal rising. In Old Kingdom Egypt that fell near the start of the Nile flood and marked the new year. The 365-day civil calendar had no leap day, so it slipped against Sirius a day every four years, realigning every 1,460 years — in 139 CE, a Roman writer recorded.

Face east. Egyptian coffin lids of about 2100 BCE carry star clocks: 36 decans, star groups rising about forty minutes apart. Most can no longer be matched to stars. Two can: Sah, Orion's Belt, and Sopdet, Sirius — run three hours and watch them rise. On midsummer nights twelve rose between dusk and dawn: night had twelve hours.

The Egyptians most revered the stars that never set: the Imperishable Stars round the pole, where the dead king's soul would live forever. When Giza's pyramids were built the pole lay near Thuban, not Polaris, and the Big Dipper beside it was Meskhetyu — a bull's foreleg, and the adze used to open a mummy's mouth so it could breathe again.