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Depictions of the Milky Way found in ancient Egyptian imagery
- wglb 1y agoPublished in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage https://www.sciengine.com/JAHH/doi/10.3724/SP.J.140-2807.2025.01.06 https://www.sciengine.com/JAHH/doi/10.3724/SP.J.140-2807.202...
- bdbenton5255 1y agoNot 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/ https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/
- AngryData 1y agoThis 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 1y agoThere 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoMuch 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 1y agoI feel lucky that I often see a lot of stars and constellations, even during twilight, in the middle of downtown San Francisco
- nullc 1y agoAnd 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 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.
- ziofill 1y agoI 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.
- selfmodruntime 1y agoStars are actually really really bright. We just forget since we block our view with smog and lights.
- typeofhuman 1y agoI can only imagine what the night sky looked like before electricity. Maybe I'll have to go to Antarctica.
- grakasja 1y agoThere are a few websites that suggest or map areas where you can get a good view e.g. https://www.darkskymap.com/nightSkyBrightness https://www.darkskymap.com/nightSkyBrightness Lots of good spots in the Western US if you're up for a long drive
- markus_zhang 1y agoYou 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 1y agoGo 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/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CersLuLBfCz/
- smolder 1y agoThis 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 1y agoRight - 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 1y agoThe 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 1y ago> 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 1y agoIf you think of stars as "points of light in the sky" as depicted here, there's really nothing strange about it.
- cubefox 1y agoThe 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 1y ago> 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 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.
- neuronic 1y agoSeeing 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoEgyptian: Draws stars along a line Conspiracist: Rubbing hands together
- markus_zhang 1y agoAncient aliens!
- infradig 1y agoThe 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoIt'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.
- AStonesThrow 1y agoIt's not odd at all to identify "hidden references" to a lot of things. The Hebrews weren't so big on astrology, but the Jews had more or less had centuries of contact with expert astrologers from Babylon, and that's where many "Western" concepts were codified. On the other hand, astrology pervaded everything the Greeks and Romans believed. So much so, that I'd say that metaphors comparing Jesus to sun-gods such as Apollo were rife in the Apostolic Age. It is not difficult to find some pericopes where Jesus' supernatural qualities can be drawn parallel to Apollo, Dionysus, Zeus, et. al. Nor is is a mere coincidence that "Sun" and "Son" are pronounced the same way. There are a ton of references to someone "entering the house" especially Jesus, and I feel that this had astrological significance to Hellenic readers, with well-established concepts of what an "astrological house" was. My mind was blown even further when I approached a hypothesis about the Bethlehem Star and its true nature, and the true nature of those "Wise Men from the East" who were following it. It's like, modern astronomers are all gratuitously missing the point by trying to track the thing down using modern criteria. Poor guys.
- pinoy420 1y ago[dead]