Named Decans

Definition

The 36 Egyptian decans — the star groups used to mark the hours of the night — were not anonymous slots; each one carried its own name. Many of those names survive on coffin lids and tomb ceilings, written in transliterated ancient Egyptian: knmt (Kenmet), srt ("the Sheep"), and others. The names often come in family clusters, where one star is the "forerunner" of the next and a third sits "under the tail" of the same figure.

In Tradition

Egyptologists read the decan names as the raw material for reconstructing how the night-clock actually worked. The names are more reliable than the scrambled table grids the copyists rarely understood, so scholars rebuild the underlying roster — the "decan list" — from the clean named text instead. Many identifications with specific modern stars remain uncertain or disputed.

In Practice

When you look at a real Egyptian decan list, you find a repeating naming pattern rather than 36 unrelated names. Around the leading decan Kenmet (knmt), for example, the list places the Forerunner of Kenmet (tpy-a knmt), then Kenmet itself, then the One under the Tail of Kenmet (hry hpd knmt) — a "forerunner / star / under-the-tail" triad. The same shape recurs around other figures: the Sheep (srt) gives the Principal Star of the Sheep, the Two Children of the Sheep, and the One under the Buttocks of the Sheep. Scholars (Neugebauer and Parker; Clagett; Belmonte and Lull; Symons) reconstruct the full roster from these names because the painted grids were copied by scribes who no longer understood them, leaving copying errors and artistic licence to be stripped away. Two slightly different decan lists survive — an earlier one and a later one — sharing most of their names; tracking which decan opens the list (Kenmet versus the pair tmat hrt) is how researchers tell one tradition from the other.

Historical Origin

The named decans appear on Middle Kingdom coffin lids (c. 2055-1650 BCE) and on the Senmut tomb ceiling (Theban Tomb 353, c. 1473 BCE), the oldest near-complete copy of the canonical celestial diagram. Knmt heads the Senmut Southern Panel decan sequence. Editions: Neugebauer & Parker, *Egyptian Astronomical Texts* (1960-1969); Clagett, *Ancient Egyptian Science* Vol II (1995), Doc III.3; Belmonte & Lull, *The Astronomy of Ancient Egypt* (2018); Symons, *Ancient Egyptian Astronomy* (1999).

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading