The Book of Nut (original title: The Fundamentals of the Course of the Stars) is a collection of ancient Egyptian astronomical texts focusing on mythological subjects, cycles of the stars of the decans, and the movements of the moon, sun, and planets on sundials.
It is titled for the sky goddess Nut who is depicted in some copies of the text arching over the earth. She is supported by the god of the air Shu. Texts in the Book of Nut include material from different periods of Egyptian history.
The original name of the book, The Fundamentals of the Course of the Stars, was discovered by Alexandra von Lieven in one of the manuscript fragments and published in 2007.[1] One of the major themes of the Book of Nut is the concept of sunrise as the mythological rebirth.
Texts
Goddess Nut, supported by the god of the air Shu; the earth god Geb is below them
There are nine different copies of the book and they have various dates. Three copies are found on monuments and six more are found in the papyri of the second century AD found in the temple library in ancient Tebtunis, a town in the southern Faiyum Oasis. These include texts both in hieratic and demotic; some parts are written in hieroglyphs as well.
Three texts of the Book of Nut are preserved on monuments: the tomb of Ramses IV, The Cenotaph of Seti I at the Osireion in Abydos, and the tomb of the noblewoman Mutirdis (TT410) of the 26th Dynasty. These monumental copies are written in hieroglyphs.
Currently, the Tebtunis textual material is scattered all over the world due to its complex excavation and acquisition history. There are several thousand fragments of unpublished papyri held by various museums that are being evaluated by scholars.
The most highly prized of the manuscripts are the demotic Carlsberg papyri 1, and 1a, because of their completeness. They were written by the same scribe. Other manuscripts are mostly fragmentary.
There are substantial differences among all of these copies, indicating that the textual tradition of the Book of Nut was still very much alive even in the second century AD.
History of scholarship
The inscription of Seti I with 36 decans portrayed
The early Egyptologists gave a lot of attention to the astronomical parts of the Book of Nut. First available for modern research was the material from the tomb of Ramses IV, which included the astronomical painting of Nut and the list of the decans. The text was first used by Jean-François Champollion and Ippolito Rosellini, later copied by Heinrich Brugsch. A new edition was issued in 1990 by Erik Hornung.[2]
In 1933, The Cenotaph of Seti I at the Osireion in Abydos was discovered.[3] This was important because this version represents the oldest text.
Adriaan de Buck's translation of the cryptographic sections of the Book of Nut significantly advanced the studies.[4]
In 1977, Jan Assmann published another relevant text from the tomb of the noblewoman Mutirdis, dating to the 26th Dynasty.[5]
Some important new material has been published since 2007.[6]
Dates of composition
Most likely the Book of Nut text evolved over a long period of time going back before the time of Seti I. The astronomical data included in the decan list below the body of Nut point to the 12th Dynasty, the time of Sesostris III.[7]
There are two different decan lists that cannot be reconciled, so one of them must be secondary. According to von Lieven, the Middle Kingdom data is secondary, and she suggests that the earlier list goes back to the Old Kingdom,[8] the first of the three major divisions of dynasties.
↑ Erik Hornung: Zwei ramessidische Königsgräber. Ramses IV. und Ramses VII. von Zabern, Mainz 1990, S. 89–96.
↑ Henri Frankfort: The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos (with chapters by Adriaan de Buck and Battiscombe Gunn). Egypt Exploration Society, London 1933.
↑ Harco Willems: The world of the coffin texts: Proceedings of the symposium held on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Adriaan de Buck, Leiden December 17 – 19, 1992. Nederlands Institut voor het Nabije Oosten, Leiden 1996, ISBN90-6258-209-5.
↑ Jan Assmann: Das Grab der Mutirdis. von Zabern, Mainz 1977, S. 85–88.
↑ Alexandra von Lieven: Grundriss des Laufes der Sterne. Das sogenannte Nutbuch. The Carsten Niebuhr Institute of Ancient Eastern Studies, Kopenhagen 2007.
Clagett, Marshall (1995). Ancient Egyptian Science. Vol.2: Calendars, clocks, and astronomy. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. p.357. ISBN0-87169-214-7.
Frankfort, Henri (1933). The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos (with chapters by Adriaan de Buck and Battiscombe Gunn). London: Egypt Exploration Society.
Hornung, Erik (1990). Zwei ramessidische Königsgräber: Ramses IV. und Ramses VII (in German). Mainz: von Zabern. ISBN3-8053-1067-6.
Lange, Hans-Otto; Neugebauer, Otto (1940). Papyrus Carlsberg No. 1: Ein hieratisch-demotischer kosmologischer Text (in German). Kopenhagen: Munksgaard.
von Lieven, Alexandra (2000). Der Himmel über Esna: Eine Fallstudie zur religiösen Astronomie in Ägypten am Beispiel der kosmologischen Decken- und Architravinschriften im Tempel von Esna. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ISBN3-447-04324-5.
von Lieven, Alexandra (2007). Grundriss des Laufes der Sterne: Das sogenannte Nutbuch (in German). Kopenhagen: The Carsten Niebuhr Institute of Ancient Eastern Studies (u.a.). ISBN978-87-635-0406-5.
von Lieven, Alexandra (2010). "Translating the Fundamentals of the Course of the Stars". In Imhausen, Annette; Pommerening, Tanja (eds.). Writings of Early Scholars in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Rome, and Greece: Translating Ancient Scientific Texts. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde. Vol.286. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN3-11-022993-5.
Nut, also known by various other transcriptions, is the goddess of the sky, stars, cosmos, mothers, astronomy, and the universe in the ancient Egyptian religion. She was seen as a star-covered nude woman arching over the Earth, or as a cow. She was depicted wearing the water-pot sign (nw) that identifies her.
Menpehtyre Ramesses I was the founding pharaoh of ancient Egypt's 19th Dynasty. The dates for his short reign are not completely known but the timeline of late 1292–1290 BC is frequently cited as well as 1295–1294 BC. While Ramesses I was the founder of the 19th Dynasty, his brief reign mainly serves to mark the transition between the reign of Horemheb, who had stabilized Egypt in the late 18th Dynasty, and the rule of the powerful pharaohs of his own dynasty, in particular his son Seti I, and grandson Ramesses II.
The Eighth Dynasty of ancient Egypt is a poorly known and short-lived line of pharaohs reigning in rapid succession in the early 22nd century BC, likely with their seat of power in Memphis. The Eighth Dynasty held sway at a time referred to as the very end of the Old Kingdom or the beginning of the First Intermediate Period. The power of the pharaohs was waning while that of the provincial governors, known as nomarchs, was increasingly important, the Egyptian state having by then effectively turned into a feudal system. In spite of close relations between the Memphite kings and powerful nomarchs, notably in Coptos, the Eighth Dynasty was eventually overthrown by the nomarchs of Heracleopolis Magna, who founded the Ninth Dynasty. The Eighth Dynasty is sometimes combined with the preceding Seventh Dynasty, owing to the lack of archeological evidence for the latter which may be fictitious.
Ancient Egyptian mathematics is the mathematics that was developed and used in Ancient Egypt c. 3000 to c. 300 BCE, from the Old Kingdom of Egypt until roughly the beginning of Hellenistic Egypt. The ancient Egyptians utilized a numeral system for counting and solving written mathematical problems, often involving multiplication and fractions. Evidence for Egyptian mathematics is limited to a scarce amount of surviving sources written on papyrus. From these texts it is known that ancient Egyptians understood concepts of geometry, such as determining the surface area and volume of three-dimensional shapes useful for architectural engineering, and algebra, such as the false position method and quadratic equations.
Interpretatio graeca, or "interpretation by means of Greek [models]", refers to the tendency of the ancient Greeks to identify foreign deities with their own gods. It is a discourse used to interpret or attempt to understand the mythology and religion of other cultures; a comparative methodology using ancient Greek religious concepts and practices, deities, and myths, equivalencies, and shared characteristics.
Merenre Nemtyemsaf II was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, the sixth and penultimate ruler of the 6th Dynasty. He reigned for 1 year and 1 month in the first half of the 22nd century BC, at the very end of the Old Kingdom period. Nemtyemsaf II likely ascended the throne as an old man, succeeding his long-lived father Pepi II Neferkare at a time when the power of the pharaoh was crumbling.
Tomb KV9 in Egypt's Valley of the Kings was originally constructed by Pharaoh Ramesses V. He was interred here, but his uncle, Ramesses VI, later reused the tomb as his own. The architectural layout is typical of the 20th Dynasty – the Ramesside period – and is much simpler than that of Ramesses III's tomb (KV11). The workmen accidentally broke into KV12 as they dug one of the corridors. In 2020, the Egyptian Tourism Authority released a full 3D model of the tomb with detailed photography, available online.
The decans are 36 groups of stars used in the ancient Egyptian astronomy to conveniently divide the 360 degree ecliptic into 36 parts of 10 degrees each, both for theurgical and heliacal horological purposes. The decans each appeared, geocentrically, to rise consecutively on the horizon throughout each daily Earth rotation. The rising of each decan marked the beginning of a new decanal "hour" of the night for the ancient Egyptians, and they were used as a sidereal star clock beginning by at least the 9th or 10th Dynasty.
Ka, also (alternatively) Sekhen, was a Predynastic pharaoh of Upper Egypt belonging to Dynasty 0. He probably reigned during the first half of the 32nd century BC. The length of his reign is unknown.
The Osireion is believed to be the cenotaph of Seti I, located to the rear of the Temple of Seti I at Abydos, Egypt. The temple was built in the 13th century BC and many researchers believe the Osireion dates from the same period. Seti I ruled from c. 1294 BCE to c. 1279 BCE.
Neferkare II was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh of the Eighth Dynasty during the early First Intermediate Period. According to the Egyptologists Kim Ryholt, Jürgen von Beckerath and Darell Baker he was the third king of the Eighth Dynasty. As a pharaoh of the Eighth Dynasty, Neferkare II's capital would have been Memphis.
Nikare may have been an ancient Egyptian pharaoh of the Eighth Dynasty during the early First Intermediate Period, at a time when Egypt was possibly divided between several polities. According to the Egyptologists Kim Ryholt, Jürgen von Beckerath and Darrell Baker he was the ninth king of the Eighth Dynasty. As such, Nikare's seat of power would have been Memphis.
Neferirkare was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh of the Eighth Dynasty during the early First Intermediate Period. According to the egyptologists Kim Ryholt, Jürgen von Beckerath and Darrell Baker he was the 17th and final king of the Eighth Dynasty. Many scholars consider Neferirkare to have been the last pharaoh of the Old Kingdom, which came to an end with the 8th Dynasty.
Tebtunis was a city and later town in Lower Egypt. The settlement was founded in approximately 1800 BCE by the Twelfth Dynasty king Amenemhat III. It was located in what is now the village of Tell Umm el-Baragat in the Faiyum Governorate. In Tebtunis there were many Greek and Roman buildings. It was a rich town and was a very important regional center during the Ptolemaic period.
The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian mathematical work, includes a mathematical table for converting rational numbers of the form 2/n into Egyptian fractions, the form the Egyptians used to write fractional numbers. The text describes the representation of 50 rational numbers. It was written during the Second Intermediate Period of Egypt by Ahmes, the first writer of mathematics whose name is known. Aspects of the document may have been copied from an unknown 1850 BCE text.
The Book of the Heavenly Cow, or the Book of the Cow of Heaven, is an Ancient Egyptian text thought to have originated during the Amarna Period and, in part, describes the reasons for the imperfect state of the world in terms of humankind's rebellion against the supreme sun god, Ra. Divine punishment was inflicted through the goddess Hathor, with the survivors suffering through separation from Ra, who now resided in the sky on the back of Nut, the heavenly cow.
The helicopter hieroglyphs is a name given to part of an Egyptian hieroglyph carving from the Temple of Seti I at Abydos. It is a palimpsest relief with two overlapping inscriptions, the titles of Ramesses II superimposed on those of his predecessor Seti I. They have been wrongly interpreted as an out-of-place artifact depicting a helicopter and other examples of advanced technology, in pseudo-scientific ancient astronaut circles.
The Theban Tomb TT410 is located in El-Assasif, part of the Theban Necropolis, on the west bank of the Nile, opposite to Luxor. The tomb belongs to Mutirdis, the chief companion lady of the God's Wife of Amun during the time of Nitocris I, and Psamtik I of the 26th Dynasty. The tomb is located in the area of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The nearby monumental tombs of the Late Period have been noted for their special features.
In ancient Egypt, the term house of eternity refers to a tomb that consists of a pit, a tomb shaft, or from mudbricks, which were later carved into rocks; or built on open land. Burial sites made of stone were a "sign of immortality", due to the long durability of stone. This was an ideal construction method that could be afforded by only a very few ancient Egyptians, due to its high cost. In ancient Egyptian mythology, the construction of a monument during one's own lifetime represented the most intensive representation with the connection of life; and the concept of living in the afterlife.
The Temple of Seti I is now known as the Great Temple of Abydos. In antiquity, the temple was known as "Menmaatre Happy in Abydos," and is a significant historical site in Abydos. Abydos is a significant location with its connection to kingship due to being the burial site of the proto-kings from the Pre-Dynastic period, First Dynasty kings, and the location of the Cult of Osiris.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
