Maps and Exploration

Dendera zodiac

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 Libra (the scales). This chapel was begun in the late Ptolemaic period; its pronaos was added by the emperor Tiberius. This led Jean-François Champollion to date the relief to the Greco-Roman period, but most of his contemporaries believed it to be of the New Kingdom. The relief, which John H. Rogers characterised as "the only complete map that we have of an ancient sky", has been conjectured in the past to represent the basis on which later astronomy systems were based. It is now on display at the Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸Dell'Arcano del Mare
• ▸Army of the Mughal Empire
• ▸Environmental issues in China

Uncatalogued shelf

Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.