An Ancient Egyptian Diagonal Star Table in Mallawi, Egypt
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Diagonal star tables (also called diagonal star clocks) are ancient Egyptian texts that relate sequences of star names to 10-day periods of the Egyptian civil year. The surviving examples are from the early Middle Kingdom (around 2100 b.c.), with one partial New Kingdom version (around 1200 b.c.). Geographically, the coffins on which the tables occur are predominantly from the necropolis of Asyut in Middle Egypt, with single examples from each of Thebes, Gebelein, and Aswan being the exceptions. The partial New Kingdom version is unique in layout and location, occurring in a monumental context in the Osireion at Abydos.The number of known diagonal star tables is small: thirteen were discussed in 1960 by Neugebauer and Parker in vol. i of their Egyptian astronomical texts (hereafter EAT 1), the first collection of the genre.1 This number had risen to twenty-three well-described examples by the beginning of 2013,2 with a further two tables whose existence was known but whose details were not.3 This paper describes one of these two tables (the other remains out of the sight of academia in a private collection in Europe).The coffin designated by the siglum S2Mal has been noted in Willems,4 Zitman,5 and Lapp.6 Its original location in the necropolis at Asyut is unknown, but it was apparently excavated by Kamal in the 1913-14 season7 and now is on public display in the Monuments Museum in Mallawi, Egypt. The museum number for the coffin is 567 and the owner's name is Hr-htp(w).& The coffin is one of three in the back right corner of the main hall of the museum.The coffin is in a glass case with access to all four sides. The lid is displayed on top of the coffin but raised about eight inches and supported by three wooden frames. The star table itself on the underside of the lid is well spaced and generally clearly legible. The decan (star or asterism) names are rendered in a style typical of Asyut in turquoise with black outlines, and each decan name is followed by a large star determinative in light yellow or white with no central dot. The table's columns are separated by thick turquoise vertical lines outlined in black; thinner black lines separate other regions. The background is yellow and some areas of chipping reveal bright white plaster beneath.The lid's three cross-braces or battens are all present and attached to the lid. The plaster and paint on these battens appear darker than the other parts of the table and the signs are largely illegible. However, traces of decan names and separating lines indicate that all three battens belong to this coffin and are correctly placed.The table is laid out in standard format for a diagonal star table.9 It is divided into four quadrants by a horizontal strip with an offering formula across the middle of the table and a vertical band with four figures (mainly obscured by the middle support). The order of figures in the vertical band can still be determined: the sky goddess Nut and Meskhetiu (the Foreleg, our Big Dipper or Plough) above the horizontal strip and Sahu (approximately equivalent to Orion) and Sopdet (Sirius) below. The offering formula starts with the large red dot characteristic of diagonal star tables, followed by an offering to Re in all his places, to Meskhetiu in the northern sky, and a voice offering of bread and beer to Hr-htp(w), the coffin's owner. The formula then becomes largely illegible because of a horizontal crack between the lid planks. The middle support also obscures part of the formula.The top row of the table contains the decades of the civil year in red. A further four rows precede the horizontal strip and five rows follow it. This table is therefore the only nine-row diagonal star table so far described. The uneven distribution of rows around the horizontal strip is not unique, but is a feature only previously seen in one other partial table, K6, S23L (see Table 1 for an index of tables) which has thirteen rows. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it