versal god manifested in the sun. Currently, though, we have no clear evidence to substantiate what might otherwise be an obvious conclusion—that from around 1500 b ce onward, the planets assumed a divinatory function. We suffer from a similar lack of knowledge concerning the constellations. As far as we can tell, about twenty-five star groups were recognized and represented by animal and human figures in an abundance of sacred texts, but we have little sense of their meaning, and, although the various scholars disagree, we can identify the location of perhaps no more than three with any certainty.27 In addition, there were thirty-six constellations, generally known to us by the Greek word decan, although they were known to early Egyptologists as diagonal calendars or, more properly, as “star clocks.”28 These were used to record the time, a critical process if nocturnal religious rituals were to be conducted at the divinely sanctioned moments, and made their appearance in drawings and texts on twelve coffin lids surviving from the Tenth Dynasty onward, before 2100 b c e, perhaps by 2400 b ce. The earliest known complete catalogue of the universe, compiled around 1100 b ce by Amenope, a scribe of sacred books in the House of Life, was intended to comprise everything made up of “heaven with its affairs, earth and what is in it” but adds little: Five constellations were listed, only two of which can be identified.29 The most important constellation we can identify with any certainty is in fact a single star, Sirius, sacred to Isis and one of the decans, which appears to be part of a stellar grouping pictured as a recumbent cow. Our lack of knowledge, though, does not lessen our awareness of the immense effort that was put into the attempt to preserve the balance between sky and earth, Ma’at and human life. In this respect, the incorporation of cosmic mathematics and symbolism into monumental architecture is probably the most famous feature of Egyptian culture. The three pyramids at Giza are the best-known examples and, of these, it’s the Great Pyramid, built by the pharaoh Khufu (Cheops) around 2480 b ce, that has the clearest celestial engagement. The pyramid faces almost exactly due north and the match is astonishing: the north side’s deviation from true north is out by only two minutes and twenty-eight seconds.30 The pyramid therefore faced the eternal, never-setting northern stars, the immortal pharaoh’s celestial kingdom; the Pyramid Text 269 reads, “He [Atum] assigns the king to those gods who are clever and wise, the Indestructible stars.”31 It appears that there are also stellar alignments from the four hitherto unexplained shafts that run in an upward diagonal fashion from the center of the pyramid, to Orion’s belt and, perhaps, Sirius, representing Osiris and Isis, the celestial king and queen. 90
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