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If the pronaos was added under the Emperor Tiberius (reigned 14-37), and the relief forms an integral part of the pronaos, then it is impossible for the relief to have been created in "50 BC." What perhaps was intended was that the star patterns approximately match those of "50 BC," but it is of course impossible to astronomically date with such precision a representation which is itself imprecise.
Also, as far as I can tell, Cauville et al. have fudged their data, and the alignment they claim did not actually take place at the time they claim. RandomCritic ( talk) 13:27, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Is the apparent joint that passes through the middle of the carving due to limitations on the size of the stone blocks originally used, or was it sawed through to make it easier to transport to Paris? 70.15.114.2 ( talk) 19:39, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Seems like the French image from Louvre has a pole star somewhere farther at the back of that jackal on the plough of Taweret. If that jackal back is Ursa Minor, then it's consistent with epsilon or zeta Ursae Minoris being pole stars, topical in the hundreds around 0 AD. Said: Rursus ☻ 20:59, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
Surely the zodiac disc depicts all 12 zodiacal signs? Why are these two called out explicitly in the introduction? Timbojones ( talk) —Preceding undated comment added 01:21, 16 May 2010 (UTC).
The first line of the 'History' section currently reads: During the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, Vivant Denon drew the circular zodiac, the more widely known one, and the rectangular zodiacs. As I recall there was only one rectangular zodiac found at Dendera, but there were also a couple at Esneh. Could these have been conflated by the original author of this article?
The article could use more current sources. I'll point out Jed Z. Buchwald's nice article on the 19th century debate on the zodiac which is available online http://eands.caltech.edu/articles/LXVI4/buchwald.html Maybe someone could use it to spruce up the Wikipedia article a bit. 173.66.1.39 ( talk) 03:56, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
Hello to all,
I am amazed to see that the last correction of certain parts of this article, was deleted!
I am a English speaker but i learnt the French language and i can assert that a big part of this article on the Zodiac of Denderah is as well fanciful as full of errors.
I thought that the writing of articles of Wikipedia offered a guarantee of seriousness and searches to avoid spreading the big errors.
I invite you to make translate the page in French about the Dendera Zodiac to notice where are your errors.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiaque_de_Denderah
That if the Musée du Louvre had not evaluated the French page dedicated to the Zodiac of Denderah on Wikiépedia, this page would have no presentation which it has at the moment.
Would the French speakers be more serious than the English speakers?
As long as this page would not have been corrected, it is certain that the English speakers will have this sad reputation regarding Egyptology...
Friendly — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.26.38.21 ( talk) 15:22, 21 June 2014 (UTC)
Salutations. Pourquoi la page anglophone est-elle la seule à ne pouvoir être traduite sur le Wikipédia francophone ? Amicalement -- LOGOS & ALOGOS ( talk) 22:10, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
The page Dendera Temple complex has this to say about the Zodiac:
Shouldn't this business have some mention on the page about the Zodiac itself? Marnanel ( talk) 19:08, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
The article suggests that between 1865 and the early 1990s no serious astronomical research was done on the Dendera zodiac and further suggests that the work published by Cauville en Aubourg in the 1990s is the final word on the dating of the monument. Note that their dating is based on the assumption that the Dendera zodiac represents a horoscope. Earlier scholars (such as Otto Neugebauer & Richard A. Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts: Part III. Decans, Planets, Constellations and Zodiacs (Providence/London: Brown University Press/Lund Humphries, 1969), pp. 72-74 & passim) have argued that the planets are depicted at their points of exaltation, a planetary configuration which in fact can never occur.
I suggest adding references to earlier research on the Dendera zodiac by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, Franz Boll and the Neugebauer/Parker book for pointing out that other interpretations are also possible. AstroLynx ( talk) 09:09, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
Hello to all,
I have recently published the astronomically correct solution to the system that was used to define layout of the carved Gods and Zodiac symbols that constitute the inner circular sections of the Dendera Zodiac. The work is scientifically robust and the results of the work are available on the website
www.denderazodiac.com
Because of the complexity of the Dendera zodiac bas-relief sculpture and the number of possible permutations of the positions of the planets of the solar system it is impossible for the sculpture's components to be successfully reverse engineered. The work that I have published uses the date of the winter solstice of 2729 BCE as the input parameter and then references the planetary ephemerides of NASA, specifically the DE441 table, to determine the rotation parameters of the eight planets of the solar system at this moment in time, 14th January in the year 2729 BCE. The NASA data is then applied as rotations to the inner circular section of the sculpture and it is shown that the planets all then align perfectly into dedicated positions in the outer section of the sculpture. There are a total of 24 precision astronomy angles that need to be applied when using this approach, and therefore the possibility of all the planets aligning without the input date also being correct is so remote as to be implausible.
The work is a major breakthrough in terms of our understanding both the Dendera Zodiac sculpture and the fact that it is intrinsically linked to the Great Pyramid of Giza. The two entities must have been designed and built by the same people and therefore the Dendera Zodiac must date back to 2729 BCE, as does the Great Pyramid.
The determination of the date of the 2729 BCE winter solstice being the key to both the pyramid and the sculpture is covered in an academic paper "The architecture of the Great Pyramid's lower northern shaft" that was published in 2021 and which is available from the URL
www.thegreatpyramidpapers.com/paperI.html
The key to unlocking the Dendera Zodiac is to realise that the hook object that was found inside the lower northern shaft of the Great Pyramid is a perfect match for the knee sections of the outer Gods of the zodiac sculpture, which shows that the hook must be an original part of the pyramid and that the sculpture must therefore use the astronomical data that can be extracted from the pyramid's lower northern shaft. Consequently I am currently in contact with the appropriate people at the Louvre museum and the British museum and am working to get the hook object sent to the Louvre museum curator for direct comparison with the sculpture.
Because this work is a major step forwards, it needs to be included on the wikipedia page for the Dendera Zodiac, but as the author of the work I do not consider that it would be appropriate for me to add references to my own work. I am as keen as you will be to retain the integrity of the page. I am therefore posting this to the page discussion and would ask everyone who is tracking this page to look at the published works and then add to this wikipedia page accordingly.
The understanding of the remarkable technical accuracy of the rotations and alignments of the sculpture to the known astronomy angles requires a decent overall understanding of the fundementals of planetary motion and I am also in contact with the department within NASA that creates the DE441 ephemeris. I would suggest that contacting other people within the wikipedia community who have this type of astronomy knowledge would be a good step when considering how to document this work on the Dendera Zodiac page of wikipedia because the remarkable nature of the discovery is concealed within the scientific accuracy of the rotation angles.
Regards, Steve Brabin 18th May 2024 Stephenbrabin ( talk) 20:43, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
![]() | A fact from Dendera zodiac appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the
Did you know column on 23 February 2008, and was viewed approximately 5,323 times (
disclaimer) (
check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
| ![]() |
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
If the pronaos was added under the Emperor Tiberius (reigned 14-37), and the relief forms an integral part of the pronaos, then it is impossible for the relief to have been created in "50 BC." What perhaps was intended was that the star patterns approximately match those of "50 BC," but it is of course impossible to astronomically date with such precision a representation which is itself imprecise.
Also, as far as I can tell, Cauville et al. have fudged their data, and the alignment they claim did not actually take place at the time they claim. RandomCritic ( talk) 13:27, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
Is the apparent joint that passes through the middle of the carving due to limitations on the size of the stone blocks originally used, or was it sawed through to make it easier to transport to Paris? 70.15.114.2 ( talk) 19:39, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Seems like the French image from Louvre has a pole star somewhere farther at the back of that jackal on the plough of Taweret. If that jackal back is Ursa Minor, then it's consistent with epsilon or zeta Ursae Minoris being pole stars, topical in the hundreds around 0 AD. Said: Rursus ☻ 20:59, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
Surely the zodiac disc depicts all 12 zodiacal signs? Why are these two called out explicitly in the introduction? Timbojones ( talk) —Preceding undated comment added 01:21, 16 May 2010 (UTC).
The first line of the 'History' section currently reads: During the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, Vivant Denon drew the circular zodiac, the more widely known one, and the rectangular zodiacs. As I recall there was only one rectangular zodiac found at Dendera, but there were also a couple at Esneh. Could these have been conflated by the original author of this article?
The article could use more current sources. I'll point out Jed Z. Buchwald's nice article on the 19th century debate on the zodiac which is available online http://eands.caltech.edu/articles/LXVI4/buchwald.html Maybe someone could use it to spruce up the Wikipedia article a bit. 173.66.1.39 ( talk) 03:56, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
Hello to all,
I am amazed to see that the last correction of certain parts of this article, was deleted!
I am a English speaker but i learnt the French language and i can assert that a big part of this article on the Zodiac of Denderah is as well fanciful as full of errors.
I thought that the writing of articles of Wikipedia offered a guarantee of seriousness and searches to avoid spreading the big errors.
I invite you to make translate the page in French about the Dendera Zodiac to notice where are your errors.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiaque_de_Denderah
That if the Musée du Louvre had not evaluated the French page dedicated to the Zodiac of Denderah on Wikiépedia, this page would have no presentation which it has at the moment.
Would the French speakers be more serious than the English speakers?
As long as this page would not have been corrected, it is certain that the English speakers will have this sad reputation regarding Egyptology...
Friendly — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.26.38.21 ( talk) 15:22, 21 June 2014 (UTC)
Salutations. Pourquoi la page anglophone est-elle la seule à ne pouvoir être traduite sur le Wikipédia francophone ? Amicalement -- LOGOS & ALOGOS ( talk) 22:10, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
The page Dendera Temple complex has this to say about the Zodiac:
Shouldn't this business have some mention on the page about the Zodiac itself? Marnanel ( talk) 19:08, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
The article suggests that between 1865 and the early 1990s no serious astronomical research was done on the Dendera zodiac and further suggests that the work published by Cauville en Aubourg in the 1990s is the final word on the dating of the monument. Note that their dating is based on the assumption that the Dendera zodiac represents a horoscope. Earlier scholars (such as Otto Neugebauer & Richard A. Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts: Part III. Decans, Planets, Constellations and Zodiacs (Providence/London: Brown University Press/Lund Humphries, 1969), pp. 72-74 & passim) have argued that the planets are depicted at their points of exaltation, a planetary configuration which in fact can never occur.
I suggest adding references to earlier research on the Dendera zodiac by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, Franz Boll and the Neugebauer/Parker book for pointing out that other interpretations are also possible. AstroLynx ( talk) 09:09, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
Hello to all,
I have recently published the astronomically correct solution to the system that was used to define layout of the carved Gods and Zodiac symbols that constitute the inner circular sections of the Dendera Zodiac. The work is scientifically robust and the results of the work are available on the website
www.denderazodiac.com
Because of the complexity of the Dendera zodiac bas-relief sculpture and the number of possible permutations of the positions of the planets of the solar system it is impossible for the sculpture's components to be successfully reverse engineered. The work that I have published uses the date of the winter solstice of 2729 BCE as the input parameter and then references the planetary ephemerides of NASA, specifically the DE441 table, to determine the rotation parameters of the eight planets of the solar system at this moment in time, 14th January in the year 2729 BCE. The NASA data is then applied as rotations to the inner circular section of the sculpture and it is shown that the planets all then align perfectly into dedicated positions in the outer section of the sculpture. There are a total of 24 precision astronomy angles that need to be applied when using this approach, and therefore the possibility of all the planets aligning without the input date also being correct is so remote as to be implausible.
The work is a major breakthrough in terms of our understanding both the Dendera Zodiac sculpture and the fact that it is intrinsically linked to the Great Pyramid of Giza. The two entities must have been designed and built by the same people and therefore the Dendera Zodiac must date back to 2729 BCE, as does the Great Pyramid.
The determination of the date of the 2729 BCE winter solstice being the key to both the pyramid and the sculpture is covered in an academic paper "The architecture of the Great Pyramid's lower northern shaft" that was published in 2021 and which is available from the URL
www.thegreatpyramidpapers.com/paperI.html
The key to unlocking the Dendera Zodiac is to realise that the hook object that was found inside the lower northern shaft of the Great Pyramid is a perfect match for the knee sections of the outer Gods of the zodiac sculpture, which shows that the hook must be an original part of the pyramid and that the sculpture must therefore use the astronomical data that can be extracted from the pyramid's lower northern shaft. Consequently I am currently in contact with the appropriate people at the Louvre museum and the British museum and am working to get the hook object sent to the Louvre museum curator for direct comparison with the sculpture.
Because this work is a major step forwards, it needs to be included on the wikipedia page for the Dendera Zodiac, but as the author of the work I do not consider that it would be appropriate for me to add references to my own work. I am as keen as you will be to retain the integrity of the page. I am therefore posting this to the page discussion and would ask everyone who is tracking this page to look at the published works and then add to this wikipedia page accordingly.
The understanding of the remarkable technical accuracy of the rotations and alignments of the sculpture to the known astronomy angles requires a decent overall understanding of the fundementals of planetary motion and I am also in contact with the department within NASA that creates the DE441 ephemeris. I would suggest that contacting other people within the wikipedia community who have this type of astronomy knowledge would be a good step when considering how to document this work on the Dendera Zodiac page of wikipedia because the remarkable nature of the discovery is concealed within the scientific accuracy of the rotation angles.
Regards, Steve Brabin 18th May 2024 Stephenbrabin ( talk) 20:43, 18 May 2024 (UTC)