The Dendera Zodiac
Unknown · c. 50 BC
A map of the sky as Egyptian priests understood it in the last years of the Ptolemies, this ceiling once covered a small chapel dedicated to the resurrection of Osiris on the roof of the temple of Hathor at Dendera. It was carved under Cleopatra VII and Ptolemy XIII. Unlike Egyptian star ceilings that arrange constellations in bands, this one is a planisphere: a circular sky disc held up at the corners by four standing goddesses and four pairs of falcon headed spirits representing the cardinal points.
Inside the circle two systems overlap. The familiar twelve zodiac signs arrived in Egypt from Babylonia by way of the Greeks, so you can pick out Aries the ram, Taurus the bull, Leo the lion, the scales of Libra and the archer Sagittarius, though Aquarius appears as the Nile god pouring two jars. Woven among them are the older Egyptian decans, thirty six groups of stars used to tell the hours of the night, and the northern constellations in Egyptian dress, including the bull's foreleg that stands for our Great Bear, tethered by a hippopotamus goddess. The planets appear as striding figures. The dates of the eclipses and planetary positions shown here are what allowed astronomers to fix the carving to around 50 BC.
Napoleon's savants recorded it on 24 January 1799. In 1820 a French antiquarian, Sébastien Louis Saulnier, hired a stonemason who cut the ceiling out with saws, jacks and gunpowder and shipped it to France, where Louis XVIII bought it in 1822. On arrival it detonated a fierce public argument, because early estimates of its age of up to fifteen thousand years contradicted biblical chronology. A plaster replica now fills the gap in the temple at Dendera.
Did You Know? When the zodiac reached Paris it set off a public scandal, since scholars who read it as many thousands of years old were accused of undermining the biblical account of creation.
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