First Known Visual Representation of Our Galaxy Discovered in Egyptian Art

The fascination with figuring out the part that the Milky Way may have played in the culture and religion of ancient Egypt has led astrophysicist Dr. Or Graur, associate professor at the University of Portsmouth, to identify what may be the first known visual representation of our galaxy in Egyptian art. In his study, published in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, he suggests that the Egyptian sky goddess Nut may be linked to the Milky Way through a hitherto overlooked iconographic detail.

The goddess Nut, whose name is pronounced “Noot,” frequently appears in Egyptian funerary texts and decorations as a naked, star-covered, arched woman stretching over the earth to protect it from the waters of chaos. Her celestial body symbolizes the vault of the sky and her role in the solar cycle is fundamental: every night she swallows the Sun as it sets to give birth to it again at dawn.

However, on the outer coffin of Nesitaudjatakhet, a singer of the god Amun-Ra who lived about 3,000 years ago, Nut presents an unusual feature: a black, wavy line that runs across her body from feet to hands, with stars distributed on both sides of this line.

Dr. Graur, after analyzing 125 representations of Nut from a corpus of 555 coffins, proposes that this line may be a representation of the Milky Way, specifically of the Great Rift, a dark band of interstellar dust that divides the diffuse glow of our galaxy.