Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Our understanding of the moon as it was regarded in ancient Egypt from the Old Kingdom to the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods is based mostly on texts and images from temples, but also on stelae, coffins, and papyri. Just as Conceptual Metaphor Theory provides a theoretical background for research on the moon in ancient Egypt, a basic knowledge of astronomical facts is essential for our understanding of the sources and of how the moon was conceptualized anciently. The conceptualizations can be categorized into those concerning astronomical properties of the celestial body (its shape, luminosity, motion, constellations), those in which the moon takes on anthropomorphic (man, child, eye, leg, arm) and zoomorphic (bull, ibis, baboon) forms, and those that have a socio-political background, concerning the reign of the pharaoh, the measuring and conception of time, and the maintenance of the cosmos (maat) as a whole.