Astronomy in ancient Egypt . Astronomy in ancient Egypt does not differ much from other civilizations, at the dawn of humanity: a mixture of scientific records linked to mystical conceptions.
For the Egyptians, the sky was represented by Nut, a goddess with the body of a woman who extended her limbs to cover the entire sky. Geb (the Earth ) served as a support, the four cardinal points being the points where Nut leaned. Through Nut, Amun-Ra (the Sun ), traveled the celestial Nile in his boat.
Summary
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- 1 History
- 1 Egyptian year opening
- 2 News
- 3 Source
History
The Egyptian civil year had 12 months of 30 days, plus 5 days called epagomena . The difference, then, was ¼ of a day with respect to the solar year. They did not use leap years : 120 years later a month was advanced, in such a way that 1456 years later the civil year and the astronomical year coincided again.
The Nile began to rise more or less at the moment when the star Sopdet , Sirius , (for the Greeks it was Sothis ), after having been invisible for a long time below the horizon, could be seen again shortly before sunrise. Egyptian had three seasons of four months each:
- Flood or Ajet.
- Winter or Peret, that is to say, “exit” from the lands out of the water.
- Summer or Shomu, meaning “lack of water”.
Egyptian year opening
The opening of the Egyptian year occurred on the first day of the first month of the Flood, approximately when the star Sirius began to be observed again a little before sunrise.
From the end of the Egyptian period ( 144 AD) are the so-called Carlsberg papyri , which contains a method to determine the phases of the Moon, from very ancient sources. In them, a cycle of 309 lunations is established for every 25 Egyptian years, in such a way that these 9,125 days are arranged in groups of lunar months of 29 and 30 days. Knowledge of this cycle enables Egyptian priests to place the mobile lunar festivals on the civil calendar.
The orientation of temples and pyramids is another proof of the type of astronomical knowledge of the Egyptians: the faces of Pyramids such as that of Gizeh were built, aligned with the pole star, with which it was possible to determine the beginning of the seasons using for it the position of the shadow of the pyramid. They also used the stars to guide navigation.
Present
The legacy of Egyptian astronomy continues to this day in the form of the calendar. Herodotus , in his Histories says:
“The Egyptians were the first of all the men who discovered the year, and they said that they found it from the stars.”
The perceptive observation of the stellar and planetary movement allowed the Egyptians to elaborate two calendars, one lunar and the other civil. The Julian calendar and, later, the Gregorian calendar, the one in use today, are nothing more than a modification of the Egyptian civil calendar .
