The Dendera zodiac

A map of the sky in stone

The Dendera zodiac is a round sandstone relief that once formed part of the ceiling of a chapel of Ausar (Osiris) in the great temple of the goddess Hathor at Dendera, in Upper Egypt. The sky is shown as a disc held up by standing goddesses and falcon-headed figures. Around the rim march 36 figures for the decans, the star groups Kemet had used to tell time for two thousand years. Inside are Egyptian constellations, the planets, and the twelve signs of the zodiac.

Two traditions on one ceiling

The zodiac signs were not Egyptian in origin. They were developed in Babylonia (in today's Iraq) and passed into Greek astronomy. The Egyptologist Christian Leitz of the University of Tübingen says they reached Egypt during Ptolemaic rule, between 305 and 30 BCE (Artnet). At Dendera they appear in a Kemetic form: some signs are drawn in the Egyptian manner, and they share the sky with older Egyptian star figures. The ceiling is a record of exchange, in which Egyptian astronomers took in a foreign system and fitted it to their own.

Dating the zodiac

The temple was founded in 54 BCE under Cleopatra (Louvre). Astronomers who studied the positions of the planets on the relief, and two eclipses it seems to mark, placed the sky it shows in the summer of 50 BCE (Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum). This is the date most often given for the carving.

The date was once fiercely argued. Napoleon's expedition to Egypt (1798–1801) made the ceiling famous in Europe, and its age became a public quarrel in Paris, tied up with arguments over science and the Bible's account of history. The mathematician Joseph Fourier estimated it at about 2500 BCE. In 1822 Jean-François Champollion, who had just deciphered hieroglyphs, read a name ring (cartouche) in a published drawing of the ceiling as "autocrator", a title of Greek and Roman rulers. When he reached Dendera in 1828 he found the drawing was wrong: the real cartouche was empty. Other evidence at the temple still confirmed a Greco-Roman date (Nature, 2010; Linda Hall Library).

How it came to Paris

In 1821 the Frenchman Jean Lelorrain, with permission from Egypt's ruler, cut the relief out of the ceiling, using explosives. It reached Paris in 1822, where King Louis XVIII bought it for the royal library's collection. It is now displayed in the Louvre. Its removal is part of the long history of Egyptian heritage taken to European museums.

This entry is labeled Documented: the object, its contents and its Greco-Roman date are well established.