Firmament dossier · Ancient cosmologies · 3 min read
Ancient Egypt: Nut, the arched sky
The sky goddess over the earth, the boat of the Sun and the riddle of the pyramids
The full text of this study is in Portuguese; the summary, key points and official view are in English.
For the Egyptians, the sky was the body of the goddess Nut, arched over the earth, Geb, and held up by the air, Shu. Every day the Sun crossed Nut’s body in a boat; at dusk she swallowed it, and it was reborn in the morning. Around and above everything were the primordial waters, the Nun. It is a dome cosmology, painted on the ceilings of temples and tombs for millennia. Next to it stands the engineering riddle of the Giza pyramids, aligned to the cardinal points to within fractions of a degree. The dossier presents Egyptian cosmology, the reading of researchers of the firmament and the questions the pyramids still raise.
Key points
- Nut appears arched over Geb in the Greenfield Papyrus (c. 950 BC), on sarcophagi and on the ceiling of the temple of Dendera.
- The “Book of Nut”, in the cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos (c. 1290 BC), describes the course of the stars across the goddess’s body.
- The Great Pyramid of Khufu (c. 2560 BC) was about 146.6 m tall and had about 2.3 million blocks.
- Its sides are aligned to the cardinal points with an error of only a few arcminutes.
- In 2013, at the port of Wadi al-Jarf, the “Diary of Merer” was found: the oldest known papyrus, recording the transport of limestone to Giza.
What the official version says
Egyptologists interpret Nut, Geb and Shu as religious mythology, not as a physical description of the world. The pyramids were built by organized teams of workers, according to evidence such as the workers’ village at Giza, the builders’ cemeteries and the Diary of Merer; the alignment may have been obtained by observing circumpolar stars or the Sun’s shadow.
Keep investigating
- The Maya: the thirteen heavens and the turtle world Precise calendars, layered heavens and the four sky-bearers
- The firmament in the Hebrew Bible The raqia, the waters above, the pillars of the earth and the windows of heaven
- Babylon: the sky made from the body of Tiamat The Enuma Elish and the Babylonian world map
Other languages: Português · Español
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