[HN Gopher] Depictions of the Milky Way found in ancient Egyptia...
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Depictions of the Milky Way found in ancient Egyptian imagery
Author : wglb
Score : 87 points
Date : 2025-05-01 13:30 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| wglb wrote:
| Published in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage
| https://www.sciengine.com/JAHH/doi/10.3724/SP.J.140-2807.202...
| bdbenton5255 wrote:
| Not surprising if you've ever had a good look at the Milky Way
| from the wilderness or countryside. Growing up in well-lit
| suburbs, I didn't see the Milky Way until I went backpacking in
| the granite domes of the Sierra Nevadas.
|
| This is an experience that I'd recommend everyone to experience
| at least once if you haven't. The memory is still burned in my
| lind, a canvas full of stars and the hazy stream of the galaxy
| stretching from horizon to horizon.
|
| Here is a nifty tool for finding areas with low light pollution
| near you, which coincidentally are typically home to
| observatories.
|
| https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/
| ziddoap wrote:
| What an awesome resource, thanks for sharing that link.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Related reading https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale
| AngryData wrote:
| This shouldn't be surprising to anybody who has spent time
| outside away from light pollution. Living in a rural area it is
| clearly and obviously visible every night when there isn't
| clouds.
| pests wrote:
| There is a story of come city in the US (San Fran?) losing
| power and emergency services were overloaded with calls of
| people freaking out over the milky way.
| derwiki wrote:
| The story is Los Angeles, but not sure the veracity
|
| Fun fact: in SF, the fog can act as a light pollution
| blanket: from the top of Mt Tam, I've looked southeast and
| seen the Milky Way on a moonless night
| nullc wrote:
| Much of Marin is relatively non-light polluted compared to
| similarly populated areas thanks to the outdoor advertising
| prohibition, though LED street lights have made things
| worse. (I'm not disputing the fog blanket point, but it's
| presumably helped by reduced light pollution).
| ljlolel wrote:
| I feel lucky that I often see a lot of stars and
| constellations, even during twilight, in the middle of
| downtown San Francisco
| nullc wrote:
| And not just a product of some contact high? :P Wild.
|
| SF is not a long trip from some pretty dark skies:
| https://www.darkskymap.com/nightSkyBrightness
|
| If you haven't ventured out to try to see the milkyway
| (be sure to check stellarium or similar) you should give
| it a try sometime.
|
| Most of the populated US is a lot further from truly dark
| skies than we are in the bay area.
|
| It does make a big difference to go somewhere _really_
| dark, but that 's a bit more of a haul. Once on a trip
| through rural Oregon I could see the milkyway through my
| windshield, pulled over to turn the lights off and view
| and was amazed that it cast a visible shadow once our
| eyes were adapted.
| nelblu wrote:
| Agreed, this shouldn't be surprising at all, on the contrary it
| is sad that today's urban generation will never appreciate what
| it is to look up and only see stars. When I was a kid we used
| to sleep on the terrace during summer season. My uncle and I
| would stare at the stars, constellations, meteors etc. and he
| would tell me their names in both English and in my native
| language. It was quite fascinating how the mythologies of the
| constellations were different in different languages. Ex: The
| great bear (ursa major) was known as the seven sages (when
| translated in English). The pole star was a mythological diety,
| Orion the hunter was actually a deer. Sometimes we stayed awake
| well into the early dawn. Those were some of my best childhood
| memories.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| One of the things that shocked me the most when visiting New
| York City is that on a daily places I would only see a tiny,
| narrow sliver of the sky. It's mostly covered up by
| buildings. Then I wondered what affect this has on the people
| who live there. It was awful for me.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| > every night when there isn't clouds.
|
| Rural Scotland here. There's always clouds. Well, 99% of the
| time anyway.
|
| So frustrating when there is northern lights and it's overcast.
| ziofill wrote:
| I saw the best Milky Way of my life while driving from Las Vegas
| to Phoenix on a summer night. My friend's car had a sunroof, but
| I had my eyes on the road so I hadn't noticed. At some point the
| guy sitting at the back points up and goes "is that the Milky
| Way??" And my friend who was on the passenger seat goes "you know
| the sunroof is tinted right?" It was SO BRIGHT! We stopped the
| car, went out and stayed there a good half hour just staring up,
| one of the best memories of my first trip to the US.
| j-krieger wrote:
| Stars are actually really really bright. We just forget since
| we block our view with smog and lights.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| I can only imagine what the night sky looked like before
| electricity.
|
| Maybe I'll have to go to Antarctica.
| grakasja wrote:
| There are a few websites that suggest or map areas where
| you can get a good view e.g.
| https://www.darkskymap.com/nightSkyBrightness
|
| Lots of good spots in the Western US if you're up for a
| long drive
| markus_zhang wrote:
| You can use the black map to find spots. Most likely there
| is one close to our city, "close" defined as within 2-3
| hours of driving.
| testing22321 wrote:
| Go to outback Australia, or remote South America or Southern
| Africa. Due to the tilt of the earth the southern hemisphere
| gets better stars.
|
| It will blow your mind.
|
| I'd been out of Australia for a decade, living in the Yukon,
| having all kinds of remote adventures. On my first night back
| in Australia in the middle of a city of 50k people I took
| photos because the Milky Way was staggering. 10x what I had
| seen in the decade prior. This is a single exposure, very much
| what it looked like in real life
|
| https://www.instagram.com/p/CersLuLBfCz/
| smolder wrote:
| This is easily understood in the context of ancient nights with
| no light pollution, and fewer distractions. Regrettably, I think
| some people will frame it in a way to try to support theories of
| ancient lost technology, alien influence, or similar
| scientifically and epistemologically unsound narratives.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Right - they saw something glaringly obvious in the night sky,
| and depicted it. There's no indication that they understood
| what they were looking at.
| WalterGR wrote:
| The article is actually about the link between Nut and the Milky
| Way - and not that anyone is surprised that ancient Egyptians
| could see the Milky Way.
| cubefox wrote:
| > However, on the outer coffin of Nesitaudjatakhet, a chantress
| of Amun-Re who lived some 3,000 years ago, Nut's appearance
| deviates from the norm. Here, a distinctive, undulating black
| curve crosses her body from the soles of her feet to the tips of
| her fingers, with stars painted in roughly equal numbers above
| and below the curve.
|
| > Dr. Graur said, "I think that the undulating curve represents
| the Milky Way and could be a representation of the Great Rift--
| the dark band of dust that cuts through the Milky Way's bright
| band of diffused light. Comparing this depiction with a
| photograph of the Milky Way shows the stark similarity."
|
| The stars around the arch are strange. As far as I know, the
| discovery that the Milky Way consists of stars was made only much
| later, after the invention of the telescope.
| svachalek wrote:
| If you think of stars as "points of light in the sky" as
| depicted here, there's really nothing strange about it.
| cubefox wrote:
| The strange thing is that since you can't see the points in
| the Milky Way without a telescope, it's unclear why the
| Egyptians drew stars on the edge of their depiction of the
| Milky Way. It seems they would have assumed it's a long cloud
| or something like that. (Indeed, an old name for "galaxies"
| outside the Milky Way was "nebulae" until a few hundred years
| ago.)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It seems they would have assumed it's a long cloud or
| something like that.
|
| I don't see why. The Chinese called it a river. The Greeks
| called it a circle. The Romans called it a road.
|
| The English appear to have called it a girdle:
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/Milky%20Way
|
| > in Middle English also _Milken-Way_ , _Milk-white girdle_
| , and _Milky Cercle_.
|
| ["Milken-Way" is a direct translation of the Latin name,
| and "Milky Cercle" is a direct translation of the Greek
| name. Girdle is less easy to explain.]
|
| > The ancients speculated on what it was; some guessed it
| was a vast assemblage of stars (Democrates, Pythagoras,
| even Ovid)
|
| I don't think there are any texts attributed to Pythagoras,
| but we might have a text that says he thought so, or that
| the Pythagoreans thought so.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| You can see stars in the Milky Way.
|
| Pedantically, all the stars you can see are in the Milky
| Way, but in the sense you mean, the furthest stars are the
| ones that form the fuzzy cloud but there are closer ones in
| the same plane that you can see, so it looks like a long
| cloud dotted with stars.
|
| So you don't need to know the fuzzy bit is also stars to
| depict stars in it.
| neuronic wrote:
| Seeing the Milky Way and thousands of stars in all colors and
| brightnesses, sparking and not, is my favorite non-social memory
| of all time.
|
| Nothing like lying on that bench on the Peloponnese in Greece in
| the summer. You could watch it for 2h and not get bored. Shooting
| stars, satellites... it was colorful and humbling.
| FjordWarden wrote:
| I thought that the Milky Way was to the ancient Egyptians a
| representation of the Nile and that the great pyramids are the
| band of stars in Orion. Maybe that is a cooky theory but not that
| unlikely that a perplexed person from 4000 years ago things the
| same as a confused person today.
| nurettin wrote:
| Egyptian: Draws stars along a line Conspiracist: Rubbing hands
| together
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Ancient aliens!
| infradig wrote:
| The milky way and zodiac from the Bible 2000 years ago...
| Revelations 22: Then the angel showed me the river of the water
| of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of
| the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on
| either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds
| of fruit, yielding its fruit each month.
| danhau wrote:
| I don't think that text literally refers to the night sky. Most
| of Relevations describes things ,,to come" and are communicated
| in signs / metaphors. See 1:1.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It's odd to look for hidden references to the Milky Way and
| the zodiac in the Bible, considering they were both well
| known before the Old Testament. If a biblical author wanted
| to talk about the Milky Way, or the zodiac, he could.
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