Depictions of the Milky Way found in ancient Egyptian imagery | Hacker News Reader

Depictions of the Milky Way found in ancient Egyptian imagery

phys.org

98 pointswglb42 comments

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.

Stars are actually really really bright. We just forget since we block our view with smog and lights.

I can only imagine what the night sky looked like before electricity.

Maybe I'll have to go to Antarctica.

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

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.

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/

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/

What an awesome resource, thanks for sharing that link.

awesome and thanks :)

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.

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.

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

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).

I feel lucky that I often see a lot of stars and constellations, even during twilight, in the middle of downtown San Francisco

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Published in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage https://www.sciengine.com/JAHH/doi/10.3724/SP.J.140-2807.202...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

If you think of stars as "points of light in the sky" as depicted here, there's really nothing strange about it.

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.)

> 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.

> > 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.

It would be remarkable if the Egyptians thought so as well. Especially as they were much earlier.

Why does being earlier make it more or less remarkable? There were no relevant developments over the intervening period.

Earlier discoveries are always more remarkable.

(A) How?

(B) This wouldn't be a discovery in either case.

(A) Inventing / discovering calculus in the 16th century is very impressive, doing the same in the 20th century much less so. (Indeed this has happened several times.)

(B) It would be a remarkable anticipation, which is similar.

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.

Egyptian: Draws stars along a line Conspiracist: Rubbing hands together

Ancient aliens!

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.

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.

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.

It'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.

> Nor is is a mere coincidence that "Sun" and "Son" are pronounced the same way.

This is an outright crazy claim. How long do you think that's been true, and for who?

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