When you think of the Milky Way, you wouldn’t be blamed if your mind didn’t associate the vast Milky Way with the ancient Egyptians.
But they’re more closely related than you and many others previously thought, and a new study connects what we see in the sky to what we saw thousands of years ago.
Space itself is still an unraveling ball of knowledge, and this week NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope just discovered another supermassive black hole.
And don’t get us started on the puzzling “question marks” discovered in deep space.
However, humans’ relationship with what we see in the night sky goes back a long way.
Speaking of ancient Egypt, there is ample evidence that the people of ancient Egypt had strong religious beliefs and astronomical knowledge of the sun, moon, and planets.
But until now, the relationship between this civilization and the Milky Way remained unknown.
A new study by astrophysicists at the University of Portsmouth reveals the relationship between the Milky Way and the little-known Egyptian sky goddess Nut.
Pyramids of Giza (Getty Images)
We have to remember that ancient Egypt existed thousands of years ago; at that time, light pollution was not a big deal at all. There were no modern cities, no street lights, which meant they could see a lot more than most of us today.
Nut is depicted as the sky goddess in the ancient art of the Egyptian civilization, and you’ll often see her depicted as a star-studded woman arching over her brother Geb, the earth god.
Her job is to protect the earth from flooding. Ancient religious beliefs held that she played an important role in the solar cycle, devouring the sun at dusk and rebirthing it at dawn. Of course, in that era, modern astronomy simply didn’t exist, so it existed to rationalize what we now know as the lunar cycle.
The new paper uses ancient Egyptian documents and simulations to argue that the Milky Way may in part illuminate the nut’s role in the sky.
The work shows that in winter, the outstretched arms of nuts depict the Milky Way. Then in the summer her spine traced the Milky Way.
Take a look at the images below to see if our content is any better:
Nut, the sky goddess, is covered with stars as the rising sun (the falcon-headed god Thunder) rises and then lowers her arms (EA Wallis Budge, Gods of Egypt, vol. 2 (Methuen & Co., 1904)))
“While I was writing a book about galaxies and researching galactic mythology, I stumbled upon Nut, the sky goddess,” said Dr. O. Grauer, associate professor of astrophysics.
“I took my daughters to the museum and they were fascinated by the image of this arched woman and kept asking to hear stories about her.
This piqued my interest and I decided to do a dual astronomical and cross-cultural analysis of Nut, the sky goddess, combining astronomy and Egyptology, and whether she was actually related to the Milky Way.
Dr. Grauer consulted ancient sources in his research, including the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts and the Book of Nuts.
He then compared them with complex simulations of the Egyptian night sky, and said he found strong evidence that the Milky Way was found in the illustrations from Nut.
Milky Way (Getty Images)
He said: “My research also shows that the nut’s role in the transition of the deceased to the afterlife and her connection to annual bird migrations are consistent with other cultures’ understanding of the Milky Way. For example, as a spiritual path between different peoples of North and Central America, or as an ornithological path in Finland and the Baltic countries.
My research shows how combining disciplines can provide new insights into ancient beliefs and highlights how astronomy connects humans across cultures, geographies, and time. This paper is an exciting start to a larger project to catalog and study the multicultural mythology of the galaxy.
Featured image credit: Getty Stock Images
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