Il cielo dei faraoni. I soffitti astronomici nell'Egitto del Nuovo Regno

In the New Kingdom (1550-1069 BC), a high official named Senenmut had an image of the night sky painted on the ceiling of the burial chamber of his tomb at Deir el-Bahari: it is the first Egyptian astronomical ceiling that has come down to us, as well as one of the first complete representations of the vault of heaven in history. Throughout the New Kingdom, the pharaohs had splendid astronomical ceilings of different types (from simple celestial maps to more complex compositions narrating the circumnavigation of the sun and the stars in the celestial vault) made in their tombs and funerary temples. Thus, the astronomical ceilings became the hallmark of royal astronomical and cosmological treatises, constituting a veritable summa of pharaonic astronomy: they are real celestial atlases enriched with captions and complex texts of a scientific-religious nature with funerary connotations. This book constitutes a systematic study of all Egyptian ceilings containing depictions or texts of an astronomical nature datable to the New Kingdom, of which it also provides a complete critical edition.