Dendera Zodiac (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The sculptured Dendera zodiac (or Denderah zodiac) is a widely known Egyptian bas-relief from the ceiling of the pronaos (or portico) of a chapel dedicated to Osiris in the Hathor temple at Dendera, containing images of Taurus (the bull) and the Libra (the scales). This chapel was begun in the late Ptolemaic period; its pronaos was added by the emperor Tiberius. This led Jean-Fran ois Champollion to date the relief correctly to the Greco-Roman period, but most of his contemporaries believed it to be of the New Kingdom. The now-accepted date for the relief is 50 BC, since it shows the stars and planets in the positions they would have been seen at that date. The relief, which John H. Rogers characterised as "the only complete map that we have of an ancient sky," has been conjectured to represent the basis on which later astronomy systems were based. It is now on display at the Mus e du Louvre, Paris.