Along 800 miles of Egyptian Nile may be found the tatters of a civilization so taken with the sky, the imprint of astronomy remains indelible even after 5000 years. To the Egyptians the sky was a rich metaphor. Its patterns of life, growth, death, and rebirth were stenciled onto the earth. The cycles of human life resonated with the sky.

Egyptian astronomy was inextricably entwined with Egyptian religion. The Egyptians plucked images from the sky and incorporated them into their temples , tombs, and tales. New kingdom temples, at Karnak and Abu Simbel, appear to be aligned with the sun. Paintings in the royal tombs of Thebes have numerous astronomical connotations. Even Giza's Creat Pyramid is linked with the sky.

A more practical product of the Egyptian astronomers was a solar civil calendar, based upon the length of the tropical year. This scheme, and the Egyptian 24-hour system of timekeeping, evolved into the calendar and clock we use today. Curiously, these two vital components of organized society are Tnost apparent in the paraphernalia of the priests and the dead. What we know of Egyptian astronomy is, in large measure, what we find in temples and burials.

We see in Egypt the applications of astronomy. The astronomy itself is only implied, and the monuments suggest Egyptian astronomy was a light weight. There is no evidence of a technical vocabulary. There is no written record of systematic observations. The comparison is usually drawn to Mesopotamia where astronomy was mathematical and bordered on true science. This is misleading, however, for mathematical astronomy in ancient Baby lonia may have begun as late as the Seventh Century B.C By contrast, when we first think of Egypt, anything from the Old Kingdom pyramids of the Third Millennium B.C. to the Ptolemaic temples, about 2500 years more recent, may come to mind. If we are really intent on evaluating relative expertise, we must be clear about what Egypt and what Mesopotamia we have in mind.

Whether astronomy in Egypt was mathematical or Scientific in a sense hardly matters. Astronomy percolated through Egyptian culture, and to appreciate its flavor we have to understand how the Egyptians interacted with the sky.

Egyptian astronomers were timekeepers. It was their function to monitor the sky to ascertain the hours and keep the calendars. We have one very late text, the Papyrus Carlsberg 9, which Seems to have been written by an anonymous astronomer. It provides a table and technigue for calculating the date, in the Egyptian civil calendar, of the start of each lunar month, in a 25-year cycle. The document is no earlier than 144 A.D. , but Richard A. Parker, a specialist on Egyptian calendrics, has shown the text reflects a tradition 500 years older than the papyrus itself. Hieroglyphic inscriptions are our most direct sources of Egyptian astronomy, but little else is as explicit as Papyrus Carlsberg 9. Before Jean Erancois Champollion cracked the hieroglyphic code in the early Nineteenth Century, classical commentaries, often unreliable, defined our notion of Egyptian astronomy. Once hieroglyphics could be read, at least in part, inscription5 were copied, collected, and translated by a variety of scholars and travelers. In an ambitious and Successful expedition (1842-1845) Karl Richard Lepsius, a German, acquired enough material from Egyptian monuments to attempt, in 1849, a chronology of Egyptian history. Lepsius also recognized and translated the astronomical character of many texts.

Revised 13 April 1996.