This papyrus replicates the great Dendera Zodiac. The Dendera Zodiac is among the most celebrated and enigmatic artefacts of ancient Egyptian astronomy—a magnificent bas-relief carved into the sandstone ceiling of the pronaos (or entrance hall) of a chapel dedicated to Ausar a.k.a. Osiris, nestled within the grand Temple of Het-Heru/Hathor at Dendera.

What distinguishes this piece above all is its form: a circular planisphere, portraying the night sky not with the usual rectilinear celestial motifs found in tombs and temples, but with a heavenly disc—an artistic expression unique in the canon of Egyptian art. This circular zodiac presents a map of the stars, with the twelve zodiacal constellations arranged in a wheel, along with an intricate celestial composition of thirty-six decans, symbolic of ten-day intervals within the 360-day Egyptian civil year. These decans, composed of first-magnitude stars, were vital to the ancient Egyptian calendar, which was governed both by lunar cycles and the heliacal rising of Sothis (Sirius)—a phenomenon long associated with the annual flooding of the Nile.

The Zodiac also features the five known planets, situated in the positions they would have held around 50 B.C., which supports the now widely accepted dating of the relief to the late Ptolemaic period. The pronaos itself was constructed under the Roman emperor Tiberius, leading the eminent Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion to date the carving correctly to the Graeco-Roman Period, despite earlier attributions by his contemporaries to the New Kingdom.

Papyrus Paper

length 16″ x height 23 1/2

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