Sopdet (Sirius)

SOP-det

egyptian: Spdt · greek: Σῶθις

Definition

Sopdet is the Egyptian goddess who is the star Sirius (alpha Canis Majoris), the brightest star in the night sky. Her Egyptian name is Spdt, transliterated Sopdet; the Greeks called her Sothis (Σῶθις). In Egyptian art she is a goddess crowned with a star, and her astral consort is Sah, the constellation Orion. Her heliacal rising — her first pre-dawn appearance after roughly seventy days hidden in the Sun's glare — was the event that anchored the whole Egyptian year.

In Tradition

For Egyptian timekeeping, Sopdet was the single most important star-goddess. Her heliacal rising — her first appearance before dawn — marked both the canonical New Year (wepet renpet) and the start of the yearly Nile inundation, the flood that fed the valley. In the *Pyramid Texts* and the funerary literature she is the female half of the great astral pair of parents — Sopdet and Sah, read by some as Isis and Osiris — and the celestial mother of the Morning Star.

In Practice

Egyptian priests watched for Sopdet's heliacal rising each year at predawn from a fixed spot, and used that date as the anchor for "Sothic dating" — calibrating the wandering 365-day civil calendar against the effectively sidereal Sothic year of about 365.25 days. The Festival of the Coming Forth of Sopdet (Peret Sopdet) is widely attested in temple and funerary calendars. Belmonte and Lull found a whole class of Egyptian temples aligned to the heliacal rising of Sirius — Family IV in their statistical scheme, significant above 99% confidence. The Sopdet-rising festival recurs in the Hellenistic-Egyptian astrological papyri, and it underlies the Greco-Roman "Sothic" chronology used by Censorinus (3rd c. CE) and by later Egyptologists.

Historical Origin

Sopdet is attested as a star-goddess in the Egyptian *Pyramid Texts* (Old Kingdom, c. 2400-2300 BCE). The earliest surviving record of an explicit Sothic-rising date is Year 7 of Sesostris III (Dynasty 12, c. 1872 BCE on Parker's chronology), on a temple papyrus from El-Lahun. She is the New-Year anchor of the Old Kingdom 12-feast offering-list (Going-Forth of Sothis, prt Spdt; Clagett, *Ancient Egyptian Science* Vol II §III), and appears as constellation L in Neugebauer & Parker, *Egyptian Astronomical Texts* Vol II, and in Belmonte & Lull, *In Search of Cosmic Order* (Family IV).

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading