At a conference in Tucson AZ I recently presented a poster showing a curious detail of the two Nut ceiling reliefs of the Dendera Hathor Temple. A focused stream with the sun at one end and a Hathor head flooded by the stream was depicted by the ancient artist. I think the classic interpretation would be sun rays, though I couldn’t find any written interpretation about this in classic literature except for “Nut giving birth to the Sun.”.

As the stream is drawn composed of triangles pointing towards the sun in my interpretation, I connect it with an ancient drawing of the Kreutz Cometary Stream, which is known in its high frequency of one comet every 2 days, only since 1996. Previously it was only known as “normal” comet family, with about 2 visible comets every century and maybe telescope-visible every few months. Maybe this comet streem was more active during the time of the temple construction? The stream is visually located between Sirius and the Sun. That means if it was more prominent back then, its first visibility during the year would be at the heliacal rising of Sirius shortly before the yearly flood.

What’s your thought about the drawing interpretation?

Other interesting details of the long rectangular Zodiac, one of the two Nut reliefs:
* directly next to the sun, a flower chalice with a snake inside is drawn, looks like a comet
* the scarab-crab is hiding behind the stream / sun, that detail is discussed in literature and defines the time during the year when the sun transits the constellation of Cancer (shortly before the Sirius heliacal rising)
* the square Nut relief (in the Wabet, Purification Chapel, the room reachable over the few stairs behind the sky-open antechamber) shows two mysterious tree-like objects rising from the ground. They remind me of plasma discharges. The symbol of the two hills is an enlarged classic hieroglyphe for hills. The classic interpretation of the twin trees is the Isched-Baum / Ished Tree: [de.wikipedia.org]

The poster as PDF for download: [www.researchgate.net]

More photos:
* square relief: [commons.wikimedia.org]
* rectangular Zodiac: [paulsmit.smugmug.com]
* 2015 video of a walk through the Wabet room by J.A.West. Regarding the 2 leaf-less trees he makes a short comment about the burning bush bush metaphor: [youtu.be] (start at minute 23)

Please note the image copyrights, when extracting individual photos.

I started a discussion on a German forum a few weeks ago already and can recommend anyone to take a look there and google-translate the replies as the discussion brought up many interesting details: [www.aegyptologie.com]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/08/2022 05:28PM by Holger Isenberg.