In search of cosmic order: Astronomy and culture in Ancient Egypt

Abstract

Over the past five years, the Egyptian-Spanish Mission on the archaeoastronomy of ancient Egypt and its collaborators has been performing an ambitious scientific project with the aim of studying the cosmovision of the ancient civilization of the pharaohs. Part of the project has consisted of a re-analysis of the iconographic and historical sources that has allowed, among other things, a reassessment of the calendar theory and a new proposal for the sky-maps of ancient Egypt. For various reasons, Archaeoastronomy has not been one of the favourite disciplines of egyptologists in the past. Probably because of this, important questions such as the orientation of Egyptian temples and the relevance of astronomy in this respect had never been afforded with the requisite seriousness and depth. Our work has had among its various priorities, the solution of this problem. In order to achieve this, our team has so far measured the orientation of some 330 temples in the Valley, the Delta, the Oases and the Sinai. The aim is to find a correct and almost definitive answer to the question of whether the ancient Egyptian sacred constructions were astronomically aligned or not. Our results may provide an affirmative answer.