nḥt

NEKHT

egyptian: nḥt

Definition

nḥt (Egyptian nḥt, "the Giant") is the Egyptian constellation that supplies the most hour-stars to the Ramesside Star Clock — a striking 16 in all. The figure of the Giant is broken into named body-parts, each used as its own hour-star: Two Feathers (Šwty n nḥt), Head + Mace (tp n nt nḥt), Neck (npbt-J), Hip (bgsf), Shank (sd-J), Pedestal (ptJ), and Knee (pd nḥt). It is not certain which constellation we know today, if any, the Giant corresponds to.

In Tradition

Egyptologists — Neugebauer and Parker in EAT, and Clagett — treat the Giant (nḥt) as one of the chief native Egyptian constellations of the northern sky, supplying the largest share of hour-stars to the New Kingdom transit-based star clock. Petrie's reconstruction tentatively places it in the Boötes-Hercules-Corona Borealis region, but Clagett calls Petrie's identification "imaginative... not realistically based." The Giant dominates Tables 1-2 of the Ramesside Star Clock, at Beginning of Night and Hours 1-5.

In Practice

nḥt shows how the Egyptian transit-clock method broke a single constellation into many separate body-part hour-stars, so the night could be told finely. In the Ramesside Star Clock (Document III.14 in Clagett), each half-month of the civil year has its own 13-position transit table, and the body-parts of nḥt fill the early-night and middle-night hour-positions. The Giant-figure imagery on Pharaonic astronomical ceilings — the Senenmut tomb TT 353, the Seti I cenotaph, the tomb of Ramesses VI — shows a standing man whose individual body-parts each carry a named hour-star. Matching nḥt to Boötes-Hercules-Corona Borealis stays tentative: the Egyptian constellation system is genuinely its own, independent of the Babylonian and Greek traditions, and many figures — parts of nḥt among them — cannot be mapped to a modern constellation with confidence. nḥt belongs, with Sah (Orion), Meskhetiu (the Big Dipper, the Bull's Foreleg), and Anu, to the canonical set of native-Egyptian northern-sky constellations.

Historical Origin

nḥt is attested in the Ramesside Star Clock (Document III.14 in Clagett, Ancient Egyptian Science Vol II, 1995) — the primary New Kingdom transit-based timekeeping document, in four copies in the tombs of Ramesses VI, VII, and IX. The Giant also appears on astronomical ceilings — the Senenmut tomb TT 353 (18th Dynasty) and the Seti I cenotaph (19th Dynasty). Treated in Neugebauer and Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts I-III (1960-1969), and Belmonte and Lull, In Search of Cosmic Order (2018).

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading