Building upon my prior post here: [www.maatforum.com] , Conman argues that Meshketiu is not a constellation but rather a “planetary god of time” and the planet represented she argues is Saturn. Conman justifies this identification through a review of the extant texts, citing movements that Meskhetiu makes that a circumpolar constellation cannot make but an outer planet can. Conman does not however propose any alternative for why Meskhetiu. There is quite alot of detail in Conman’s book which I won’t go into here. However, if we provisionally accept her proposal and look to see if there are other possible explanations for the seven stars.

To be clear, the inversion of the drawing, whether horizontally or vertically would allow for Wainwright's allocation of Meskhetiu to the Great Bear to stand based on a possible artistic license. However, it should be weighed against other evidence of the properties of Meskhetiu in the extant sources per Conman’s review. An inversion caused by artistic license is argued by Bauval and Hancock with respect to the Orion Correlation Theory, which you can find some details of in Krupp's rebuttal of OCT here: [web.archive.org] . It appears that OCT was afflicted by two competing inversions whereas for Wainwright’s, we have just the one.

In her book, Joanne Conman presents a series of arguments based on texts including Pyramid Text, Coffin Texts and from other sources that demonstrate properties of Meskhetiu that a circumpolar constellation cannot meet but a planet can. Conman ultimately determines that Meskhetiu is the planet Saturn. I am still working through her reasoning and so reserve my opinion on her call. Conman does not suggest this but I did a quick check by overlaying a chart of the apparent motion of Saturn (Figure 1 of De Jong's paper here: [link.springer.com] ) over an image of Meskhetiu:

[i.imgur.com]

In doing so, I have rotated the image of Meskhetiu making the hoof represent West and selected the best fit of the three segments of apparent motion presented in De Jong's figure. Taking some artistic license, there is a reasonable fit, although the AR and LA are not quite in the right position. The apparent motion chart is read from right to left, with the five synodic phenomena marked:
FA = First Appearance
S1 = First Station
AR = Achronycal Rising
S2 = Second Station
LA = Last Appearance

Interestingly, when the Babylonian's modelled Saturn's motion with their System A model, they two additional points in Saturn's journey, with one point in between First Appearance (FA) and First Station (FS) to track an apparent velocity change and another point between Second Station (S2) and Last Appearance (LA) again to track an apparent velocity change (refer to Babylonian Mathematical Astronomy: Procedure Texts By Mathieu Ossendrijver pp 309-310). Following the apparent motion arc, that is where the additional stars appear to be placed.

One of the problems with this proposal is that the shape formed by the apparent motion of Saturn bears no resemblance to a foreleg, I wondered whether there may be some other aspect of Saturn’s synodic phenomena that may introduce this. I made one further image which overlays a chart of the timing of First Appearances of Saturn onto the image of Meskhetiu
[i.imgur.com]

The chart comes from the same paper by De Jong referenced earlier. According to De Jong, the data in the chart is synthetically calculated. Data from actual observation may be expected to have an error margin of 1-2 days. The chart appears to follow the shape reasonably well from the hoof which aligns to the peak of the chart through to about two thirds the way up. In the image I selected there is a yellow mark where the next peak occurs, although it is unclear if that is intentional or significant as I haven’t investigated any additional images as yet.