While the Esna Temple has been waiting to renew and breathe again for a long time, it has recently experienced the joy of regaining its old colors.
While the old pictures in the temple regained their colors, it was seen that a different mystery emerged from under the dust. There was literally a whole universe hidden beneath the layers of the soot.
Besides the emerging images of known constellations such as the Big Dipper (Mesekhtiu) and Orion (Sah), other images such as RA’s geese stunned Egyptologists. (The symbol of Ra is goose).
Constellations and mysterious images, some of which have not yet been named, have been found in the temple. We probably don’t know what the artists who made yet these things know.
“There are many constellation representations carved in relief and already known, but that doesn’t mean we know them all,” says Egyptologist Christian Leitz, who led the project. What we found under the institution were the previously unknown Egyptian names of these constellations. ” she said.
You can never understand what symbolizes the Big Dipper (above). It appears as the foot of a bull held by the goddess Tawaret, who often appears as a hippo. The ancient Egyptians viewed the Big Dipper as a manifestation of the god Seth, who killed his brother Osiris and scattered parts of his body over the earth. He was never fully resurrected, so he reigned as the god of the dead. After that, Seth was never allowed to reach Osiris in the underworld. The Tawaret is seen holding it back (in the shape of a bull’s leg) and this seems literally written to the stars because the Big Dipper never sinks below the horizon.
Perhaps the temple was built to align with a star or stars in one of the mysterious constellations. If proof of this were to come out, it would not be the first connection of the mortal world with the divine.
“So far this is unknown! Some temples, such as Karnak, have an absolutely astronomical alignment (with the winter solstice in this case), but it is not that easy to say for most existing temples. It is believable only if you have a connection with the main temple. God, star, or constellation are subjects that are normally very difficult to prove. ” he said.
Because the ancient Egyptians believed that the underground Duat ruled by Osiris was where the gods lived. They are thought to copy it on Earth, creating a sacred landscape. They aligned the three pyramids in the Giza valley with the three stars in Orion’s belt, as the Duat, Orion, and Sirius in order to constellations took place just before the sunrise when the summer solstice rises near the sun. The lion-headed Sphinx was the Earth equivalent of the constellation Leo, and the Nile was supposed to represent the Milky Way.
So what could be Ra geese? Is there a possibility that the ancient Egyptians saw the swan constellation Cygnus?Considering the 88 known constellations, it seems that one of these stars is the closest relative to Ra, but remains a secret for now. Perhaps more work on the temple will finally shed light on this secret.
