The Dendera zodiac

A map of the ancient sky blasted out of an Egyptian ceiling

The Temple of Hathor at Dendera, begun in 54 BC and finished under Roman emperors, is one of the best preserved temples in Egypt, and it holds two famous puzzles. On the ceiling of a chapel of Osiris was carved the Dendera zodiac, called the only complete map we have of an ancient sky: the northern heavens centred on the pole star with Ursa Minor as a jackal, the signs of the zodiac, some in their Greek forms and Aquarius as the Nile flood god, all ringed by the 36 decans of the Egyptian year. When Vivant Denon published drawings of it after Napoleon’s campaign, scholars argued over whether it was tens of thousands of years old. A dealer had it cut out with saws, jacks and gunpowder, and it reached Paris in 1821; it is in the Louvre. The second puzzle is in the crypts: reliefs of a snake rising from a lotus inside a great oval, which a fringe theory reads as an ancient light bulb. The hieroglyphs carved beside them say they show statues from a creation myth. Cleopatra and her son Caesarion are carved on the back wall.