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| - This article covers the history of Egypt technology, from Ancient Egyptian technology, to the Persian and Hellenistic periods, to medieval Islamic technology, to modern Egyptian technology.
- This article covers the history of Egypt technology, from Ancient Egyptian technology, to the Persian and Hellenistic periods, to medieval Islamic technology, to modern Egyptian technology. were normally divided into 12 hours each, the length of which would vary according to the time of year.
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| abstract
| - This article covers the history of Egypt technology, from Ancient Egyptian technology, to the Persian and Hellenistic periods, to medieval Islamic technology, to modern Egyptian technology. were normally divided into 12 hours each, the length of which would vary according to the time of year. Key to much of this was the motion of the sun god Ra and his annual movement along the horizon at sunrise. Out of Egyptian myths such as those around Ra and the sky goddess Nut came the development of the Egyptian calendar, time keeping, and even concepts of royalty. An astronomical ceiling in the burial chamber of Ramesses VI shows the sun being born from Nut in the morning, traveling along her body during the day and being swallowed at night. During the Fifth Dynasty six kings built sun temples in honour of Ra. The temple complexes built by Niuserre at Abu Gurab and Userkaf at Abusir have been excavated and have astronomical alignments, and the roofs of some of the buildings could have been used by observers to view the stars, calculate the hours at night and predict the sunrise for religious festivals. Claims have been made that precession of the equinoxes was known in Ancient Egypt prior to the time of Hipparchus. This has been disputed however on the grounds that pre-Hipparchus texts do not mention precession and that "it is only by cunning interpretation of ancient myths and images, which are ostensibly about something else, that precession can be discerned in them, aided by some pretty esoteric numerological speculation involving the 72 years that mark one degree of shift in the zodiacal system and any number of permutations by multiplication, division, and addition." Note however that the observation that a stellar alignment has grown wrong does not necessarily mean that the Egyptians understood or even cared what was going on. For instance, from the Middle Kingdom on they used a table with entries for each month to tell the time of night from the passing of constellations: these went in error after a few centuries because of their calendar and precession, but were copied (with scribal errors) for long after they lost their practical usefulness or possibly the understanding of them.
- This article covers the history of Egypt technology, from Ancient Egyptian technology, to the Persian and Hellenistic periods, to medieval Islamic technology, to modern Egyptian technology.
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