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An Egyptian sarcophagus shows the sky goddess Nut as being covered in stars and having a dark, undulating curve running through her body.
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This depiction is thought to illustrate the Great Rift, a band of dust and gas that appears to split the Milky Way in two.
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While this is the clearest known evidence for the ancient Egyptians understanding the Milky Way, others examples have also been found to reveal the knowledge of the cosmos.
Ancient Egyptians were astronomers ahead of their time. Thousands of years before a modern telescope would ever see first light, they already had their own system of constellations and understood the movements and phases of planets, moons, and stars. They would later create more elaborate star charts and even reflect their knowledge of the universe in their deities.
Nut, the Egyptian sky goddess, went beyond representing the firmament above. She was the entire cosmos. Often depicted standing over her brother Geb, the Earth, she appears as a woman covered in stars. Astrophysicist Or Grauer of the University of Portsmouth was intrigued by the symbolism of Nut. Because he previously thought she might represent the Milky Way, he decided to search museum collections for every image of her he could possibly find, from tomb paintings and carvings to funerary texts and sarcophagi. It was when he came upon one particular sarcophagus that he realized something. Nut did not represent the Milky Way, but it was contained within her.
The sarcophagus that changed Grauer’s mind belonged to Nesitaudjatakhet, a high-ranking priestess, chantress of Amun Ra, and musician of the vulture-headed mother goddess Maut. Painted on one side of the sarcophagus is a cosmological vignette featuring Nut, naked and glittering with stars. What stood out to Grauer was a dark undulating curve running from Nut’s fingertips to her toes, dividing the stars roughly in half. Grauer was convinced that this line was meant to represent the Great Rift—a visible band of dust and gas that appears to bisect the Milky Way’s vast expanse of diffuse light. Egyptian stargazers looking upward from early summer through the middle of autumn would have been able to see it on a clear night.
“A comparison with a photograph of the Milky Way shows the stark similarity between the undulating curve running through Nut’s body and the undulating curve create by the dark nebulae that make up the Great Rift,” Grauer said in a study recently published in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage.
He knew this had to be more than an artistic flourish. There is already a faint line separating Nut’s legs, and while it is possible the curve represents the Egyptian belief of the sky being divided into daytime and nighttime halves, Nut is in her evening form—completely covered in stars. The goddess is pictured without stars in daylight. An absence of stars from Nut’s body in many 21st and 22nd Dynasty coffins raises the question of whether Egyptians preferred depicting the day sky then. It may have been a trend, but it is unknown how many coffins from the period are either lost, stolen or still buried in undiscovered graves.
Nesitaudjatakhet’s sarcophagus is not the only Egyptian cosmological vision that mirrors the Milky Way. The astronomical ceiling in the burial chamber of the tomb of Seti I shows a similar kind of undulating curve dividing the stars, planets, and constellations of the night sky. The burial chamber in the tomb of Tausert and Setnakht has an astronomical ceiling that also includes this curve. Rameses IV was buried under a ceiling whose two haves are based on the way Nut is described in Fundamentals and the Book of the Night. These images of Nut are positioned back to back with a golden undulating curve between them.
What might be the most detailed depiction of the Milky Way is the ceiling of Rameses VI’s burial chamber, whose halves illustrate The Book of the Day and The Book of the Night. Again, the figures of Nut are back to back, but both are the starry nighttime version, each with a curve that runs down Nut’s back from the base of her hair. Grauer thinks this shows that the curve is directly connected to her.
“I suggest that this undulating curve is the visual representation of the Milky Way, which the Egyptians saw as cleaving the sky in two,” he said. “Moreover, it reopens the possibility of ‘Winding Waterway’ being the ancient Egyptian name of our galaxy.”
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