Meskhetiu

Meskhetiu occupies the stars of the Great Bear and is drawn as the severed foreleg of a bull, or sometimes as an adze of the same shape. It is associated with Set, and it is chained or tethered in some depictions, held in place by a hippopotamus goddess so that it cannot do harm.

The name is shared with a ritual instrument and that is the point. In the opening of the mouth ceremony, an adze called the meskhetiu is touched to the face of the mummy or the statue so that the dead may breathe, eat and speak. The instrument and the constellation are the same word, and the northern sky and the funerary rite are being deliberately tied together.

The foreleg itself is the offering. A bull's foreleg, cut while the animal was still alive in some accounts, is presented in offering scenes and is among the most valued cuts, so the sky holds up the best part of the sacrifice permanently.

Its stars never set at the latitude of Egypt. The circumpolar stars are the ikhemu-sek, the imperishable ones, and the dead king's destination in the Pyramid Texts is among them, precisely because they do not die. A constellation that never sets is not a decorative choice for a funerary figure; it is the whole argument.

Egyptian cosmology is oriented by the Nile rather than by the compass. South is upstream and is the direction one faces by default; the word for going north is to go downstream, and the word for going south is to travel by sail, because the prevailing wind blows against the current. When the Egyptians encountered the Euphrates, which runs the other way, scribes described it as the inverted water.

The sky is read the same way. Nut arches over the earth and the sun is carried along her body by boat, the day boat and the night boat, and the whole apparatus of the sky is a river journey. Sah and Sopdet appear in the southern sky in the season of the flood; Meskhetiu turns in the north and never leaves.

That gives the sky a clean division of labour. The southern sky is where the year happens, arriving and departing, tied to the river and to the resurrection of Osiris. The northern sky is where nothing happens, and its stability is the reason the dead want to go there.

The star clocks, the decans, the funerary texts and the temple orientations are all working from this one picture, and it holds with very little change for the better part of three thousand years, which is longer than any comparable scheme anywhere has lasted.