Naos of the Decades

Definition

The Naos of the Decades — also called the Naos of Saft el-Henna — is a 30th-Dynasty Egyptian shrine of king Nectanebo I (about 380-362 BCE), surviving in four pieces: the back, found at Saft el-Henna in 1906 and now in the Cairo Egyptian Museum, and the left and right sides, recovered at Canopus in 1999 by Franck Goddio's IEASM mission. Each of the 36 decans — the star-groups that mark the hours of the night — is catalogued with five characteristic images marking five stages of its yearly cycle, from heliacal rising through its conjunction in the Duat (the underworld).

In Tradition

Egyptologists treat the Naos of the Decades as the great 4th-century-BCE record of the decans — the most complete surviving original monument of the Egyptian decan system, three centuries older than the Dendera Zodiac. Belmonte and Lull, Leitz, and von Bomhard read it as the bridge between the New-Kingdom decanal star clocks and the later Greco-Roman astrology, the decan-archon doctrine that Greenbaum traces.

In Practice

The Naos gives historians the fullest original record of the Egyptian decan system. Each of its 36 decans carries a five-image yearly cycle (catalogued by Leitz in 1995: a bird for the heliacal rising, a falcon-sphinx for the 120-day working period, a lion-headed ram for after culmination, a dog-headed standing mummy for the heliacal setting, a lying mummy for the 70-day stay in the Duat), set beside texts that von Bomhard sees "gradually gliding" from native decan-deity myth toward the predictive astrology later organised in Hellenistic Alexandria. Belmonte and Lull point to the text of the 35th decade, where the decans are sent against Apophis on Re's behalf — a myth rooting decan-theology in the solar story. Greenbaum reads that decade-versus-Apophis narrative as evidence for the doctrine of danger in the epagomenal days that feeds Hellenistic twelfth-place symbolism. The Naos thus works two ways at once: as an Egyptian source for native decan religion, and as the transmission point for the Greco-Egyptian decan system that Hellenistic astrology absorbed.

Historical Origin

30th Dynasty, made under Nectanebo I (about 380-362 BCE); the back came from Saft el-Henna, the side panels from Canopus (IEASM/Goddio, 1999). The back is in the Cairo Egyptian Museum, the flanks in the Goddio collection. Standard treatments: A.-S. von Bomhard, The Naos of the Decades (2008); Christian Leitz, Altägyptische Sternuhren (1995); J. A. Belmonte and J. Lull, In Search of Cosmic Order / Astronomy of Ancient Egypt (2009/2018), sections 2.3 and 3.1.2; Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum, The Daimon in Hellenistic Astrology (2016), chapter 5.

Further Reading

• Juan Antonio Belmonte & José Lull, In Search of Cosmic Order: Selected Essays on Egyptian Archaeoastronomy
• Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum, The Daimon in Hellenistic Astrology