“In Search of Lost Time: An Astronomical View of Ancient Egyptian Star Clocks”

Presenter: Luna Zagorac, Physics graduate student and Digital Humanities Lab consultant

Though the Ancient Egyptians clearly had a relationship to the heavens, the observational data behind the relationship remains shrouded in mystery. One of the most enigmatic elements of their supposed timekeeping were star clocks, lists of stars and constellations – called decans – which marked the passing of the hours of the night. The decans performed mysterious actions during the night, which the most prolific work in Egyptian Astronomy equates with heliacally rising (rising at sunset). This theory is not without tension, however, and leaves the vast majority of the decans unidentified.

As a Fellow of Yale’s Franke Program in the Humanities and Natural sciences, I have been working on comparing these lists and tables to a reproduction of the Ancient Egyptian sky at different dates. My aim it to create a correlation of the Egyptian sky with the Greek names we use today, thus creating a diagram of the Egyptian heavens. I have begun creating my Python own code for this purpose, called Decan-O.py, which relies on the core python package AstroPy.

Decan-O.py takes in a named star and returns its coordinates in the night sky for a given year BCE, and then uses that information to generate plots of the star’s altitude and location on the horizon over the year — information that I hope to use to constrain the actions of the Egyptian decans.

Furthermore, I am experimenting with using the raw data to create custom star charts in ArcGIS Story Maps, thereby getting a different view of the data and a better visualization of the so-called “decanal belt”. My hope is that this can serve to recreate the experience of stargazing in Ancient Egypt as an experimental archaeology practice even a little bit, particularly while planetariums remain closed and travel is risky due to COVID.

This presentation will take place at the 2021 Connecticut Digital Humanities virtual conference. Registration is free and all are invited to attend! To sign up, visit the CTDH program page.

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