Egyptian decans

The decans as gods

The thirty-six decans were divine from the start, written with the sign of a god even when they served as hour stars. Over two thousand years they gained a life story in the Book of Nut, individual bodies on temple ceilings, a role among the agents of plague and protection, and finally a place as demons in the magic of late antiquity.

36
named star gods
70
days hidden each year
380 BCE
Naos of the Decades

The decans' divine career

From hour stars written with the sign of a god to dangerous powers with knives and lion heads: the monuments and ideas that turned a star calendar into a company of gods.

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Gods from the first lists

Asyut & Middle Egypt c. 2100 BCE

On the earliest coffin-lid tables the decan names already carry the determinative of a god. The decans were divine while they were still hour markers, and the lids that list them also picture Nut, the sky goddess over whose body they travel.

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Sopdet and Sah

the leaders Old Kingdom onward

Sirius was Sopdet, identified with Isis, and Orion was Sah, identified with Osiris. Named in the Pyramid Texts and drawn standing in boats on Senenmut's ceiling, the two gave the whole company of decans its character as a divine family on the move.

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Death in the Duat

Abydos & Thebes c. 1290 BCE onward

The Book of Nut, carved in Seti I's cenotaph and the tomb of Ramesses IV, tells how each decan sets, spends seventy days in the house of embalming, is purified and is born again in the east. A Roman-period demotic commentary shows priests still studying it.

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Families of lists

tombs & temples New Kingdom to Roman

No single canon of the thirty-six exists. Neugebauer and Parker sorted the lists into families such as the Senenmut, Seti I and Tanis groups, each with its own order and spellings. Sah and Sopdet are constant; many other names come and go.

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The Karnak water clock

Karnak c. 1380 BCE

Made under Amenhotep III and usually called the oldest surviving clepsydra, the alabaster vessel marks night hours inside and carries the sky outside: decans, planets and the northern constellations. The gods who governed time are carved onto the device that measured it.

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Figures in boats

Edfu, Dendera & Esna Late Period to Roman

Late monuments give each decan a body: snake-headed, lion-headed, ram-headed or falcon-headed, crowned with a star or disk, often standing in a boat, some armed with knives. Once every decan had its own image, it could be carved on a stone or described in a spell.

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Agents of Sekhmet

temple theology 1st millennium BCE

Late texts link the decans with the messengers and slaughterers of Sekhmet, the lion goddess of plague. Each decan, ruling its ten days, could send disease or hold it back. How closely the two groups were identified is still argued over by specialists.

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The five days outside

the calendar year's end

Thirty-six decans of ten days cover 360 days, leaving five epagomenal days outside their care. These were the birthdays of Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys and also the most dangerous days of the year, when protective spells were most needed.

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The Naos of the Decades

Saft el-Henna & Abu Qir 380–362 BCE

A shrine of Nectanebo I that lays out the year decan by decan, with each one's image and its effects in its ten days. Broken up and partly sunk in the bay of Abu Qir, it was reassembled in publication in 2008 from pieces in the Louvre and Alexandria.

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Processions overhead

Upper Egypt Ptolemaic & Roman

On late temple ceilings the decans march in procession across the sky goddess's body, often in registers beside the planets and, by Roman times, the zodiac signs. They are shown as a working divine crew, steering the hours, not as a star map.

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Names in Greek dress

Hellenistic Egypt 2nd century BCE onward

Greek astrologers took over the decan names along with the decans, and Hephaistion of Thebes lists thirty-six of them. Sopdet became Sothis, and the serpent Chnoubis on healing gems is usually traced to Kenmet. Many later names have lost their Egyptian roots entirely.

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From gods to demons

eastern Mediterranean 1st–5th century CE

In the Testament of Solomon the thirty-six decans become spirits of darkness bound by the king, each confessing the illness it causes. Celsus, quoted by Origen, credits the Egyptians with thirty-six demons dividing the body. The old gods kept their number and their power over disease.

Kings, builders and modern readers

The rulers whose monuments carry the decan gods, and the scholars who collected, edited and reassembled them.

Amenhotep III

reigned c. 1390–1352 BCE Thebes

King under whom the Karnak water clock was made, its outer surface carved with the decans, the planets and the northern constellations around the instrument that measured the night.

Seti I

reigned c. 1290–1279 BCE Abydos

Nineteenth-Dynasty king whose cenotaph at Abydos preserves the Book of Nut, the treatise that describes the decans' yearly death, purification and rebirth along the sky goddess's body.

Ramesses IV

reigned c. 1155–1149 BCE Valley of the Kings

Twentieth-Dynasty king whose burial chamber ceiling carries a second copy of the Book of Nut, the sky goddess arched over the sarcophagus with the decans on their course.

Nectanebo I

reigned 380–362 BCE Saft el-Henna

Founder of the Thirtieth Dynasty, one of the last native Egyptian royal houses, who commissioned the Naos of the Decades with its decan-by-decan account of the year's powers.

Heinrich Brugsch

1827–1894 Germany & Egypt

Egyptologist whose Thesaurus Inscriptionum Aegyptiacarum gathered the astronomical inscriptions, decan lists among them, into one of the first systematic collections for scholars to work from.

Otto Neugebauer & Richard Parker

1899–1990 & 1905–1993 United States

Editors of Egyptian Astronomical Texts, who sorted the decan lists into families and set out the evidence for the decans' order, names and images monument by monument.

Christian Leitz

20th–21st century Germany

Egyptologist at Tübingen whose studies of the star clocks and of the dangerous gods of temple theology placed the decans among the protective and threatening powers of late Egyptian religion.

Alexandra von Lieven

21st century Germany

Egyptologist whose 2007 edition of the Book of Nut, together with its demotic commentaries, is the standard modern treatment of the text that describes the decans' death and rebirth.

Anne-Sophie von Bomhard

21st century France

Author of the 2008 publication that reunited the scattered pieces of the Naos of the Decades on paper and read its decan-by-decan text as a bridge between Egyptian sky lore and astrology.

Joachim Friedrich Quack

20th–21st century Germany

Egyptologist at Heidelberg who has traced the decans from hieroglyphic and demotic sources into Greek astrology and magic, following how their names and functions changed on the way.

Star gods from the beginning

The decans were never only clock stars. Even on the Middle Kingdom coffin lids, where they serve as hour markers, the thirty-six are written with the star sign and the determinative of a god, and the tables share the lid with figures of Nut, the sky goddess, and other deities. To an Egyptian there was no contradiction between a star that told the hour and a star that was a living power. The sky was populated, and the beings who crossed it each night were gods whose regular movement kept the world in order. What changed over two thousand years was the kind of god the decans were thought to be: at first members of the sky's orderly crew, later powers with tempers, weapons and the ability to strike the living with disease. This page follows that second career, which began in temple theology and ended in the demon lists of late antiquity.

Sopdet and Sah at the head

Two decans stood above the rest. Sopdet, the star Sirius, was identified with Isis, and Sah, the bright stars of Orion, with Osiris. Both appear already in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, long before the decan tables, as the celestial forms of the dead king's divine family. On the ceiling of Senenmut's tomb at Deir el-Bahri, painted around 1470 BCE, Sah and Sopdet are drawn as figures standing in boats, while most of their companions are given as names alone. The pairing mattered for the whole group. Because the most important decans were Isis and Osiris in their starry forms, the others were understood as gods of the same kind, travelling the same route of setting, hidden passage and return that the Osiris myth gave its central figure.

Seventy days of death

The fullest account of the decans' life is the Book of Nut, a cosmological treatise inscribed in the cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos and again on the ceiling of the burial chamber of Ramesses IV in the Valley of the Kings. The sky goddess Nut arches over the earth, and the decans travel along her body. Each one sets in the west, enters the Duat, and stays hidden for seventy days. During that time it is said to be in the house of embalming, where it is purified like a mummy, before it is born again on the eastern horizon. The text treats this as the normal life of a star rather than a misfortune: death and rebirth are the cycle that keeps the year turning. A demotic commentary on the Book of Nut, preserved on papyri from the Roman period, shows that priests were still studying and explaining the treatise more than a thousand years after Seti's builders carved it.

Families of lists

There was never one official roster of the thirty-six. The decan lists on New Kingdom ceilings, later sarcophagi and Ptolemaic temples differ in order, in spelling and sometimes in which stars they include. Otto Neugebauer and Richard Parker sorted the surviving lists into families, naming each after a characteristic monument, among them the Senenmut, Seti I and Tanis families. Some names recur almost everywhere: Sah and Sopdet, and the group around Kenmet and Khentet, names that appear in several forms with prefixes meaning roughly the one before and the one after. Other names appear in one family and not in another. The variation reflects real astronomical problems, since a list fitted to one century drifted against the calendar in the next, but it also shows that the decans had become a theological catalogue that each workshop copied from its own sources.

Gods on a water clock

The decans did not leave timekeeping behind when they became gods; the two roles ran together. The alabaster water clock made under Amenhotep III and found at Karnak, usually described as the oldest surviving clepsydra, measures the hours with water draining through a hole near its base. Its outside carries the sky: the decans, the planets and the northern constellations, carved in registers around the vessel. The inside marks the hours of the night for each month. The instrument is practical, but the gods on its surface are not decoration. The clock worked because the decan gods moved as they did, and picturing them on the vessel placed the device under their authority.

How the decans were pictured

In the New Kingdom most decans are names in columns. In the Late Period and under the Ptolemies they acquire individual bodies. On temple ceilings at Edfu, Dendera and Esna, and on late sarcophagi, each decan is shown as a distinct figure, often standing in a boat and crowned with a star or a sun disk. Many are hybrid: snake-headed, lion-headed, ram-headed or falcon-headed, some carrying knives or bows, some seated as mummiform gods. The images vary from monument to monument, just as the names had varied, but the principle was settled. Each decan now had a recognisable form that could be carved, painted, engraved on a stone or described in a text. This habit of giving each decan its own image is what later made the decans usable in Greek, Arabic and Renaissance magic, where everything depended on reproducing the right figure.

Messengers of Sekhmet

From the first millennium BCE the decans increasingly appear among the dangerous powers of the Egyptian world. Late Period and Ptolemaic texts link them with the messengers and slaughterers of Sekhmet, the lion goddess whose anger could bring plague. These beings carried out divine punishment, and the decans, each responsible for a stretch of the year, were thought able to send disease during their ten days or to hold it back. Protective rituals addressed them, and amulets and magical texts named them. Scholars still debate how far the decans themselves were identified with Sekhmet's agents and how far they were simply one group of protectors and attackers among many, so the relationship should not be overstated. What is clear is the direction of travel: the stars that had marked the hours were now gods whose attention could be dangerous.

The days outside the year

The decanal calendar covered 360 days. The civil year had 365, and the five extra days, the epagomenal days, stood outside the count. They were the birthdays of Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys, and they were also a time of particular danger, when the year was exposed and the agents of Sekhmet were thought to be active. Texts for protection during these days survive, and they invoke the gods to keep the year's end from turning into a season of plague. The position of the decans in this belief is telling: each decan guarded or threatened its own ten days, and the five days that no decan governed were the most hazardous of all.

A sky over the dead

The decans never left the funerary setting where they first appeared. From the New Kingdom to the Roman period, coffins, sarcophagi and burial chambers placed the sky goddess Nut over the body of the deceased, and the decans often travel across her as they do on temple ceilings. The meaning had shifted since the Middle Kingdom tables. Those had told the hours of the night for a dead person who would need them; the later images surround the dead with the gods whose own cycle of setting, hidden passage and rebirth promised the same for them. A person buried beneath Nut and her decans was placed inside the pattern of the Book of Nut, joining the stars that die in the west and rise again in the east. Late Period and Ptolemaic sarcophagi of high officials make the point with care, giving the decans their names and individual images, and by the Roman period coffins from Thebes could combine Nut, the decans and the Greek zodiac in a single painted sky. Throughout, the decans in a tomb are protectors and companions of the dead, a role that sits beside their more dangerous character among the living.

The Naos of the Decades

The clearest monument of the decans as powers is a shrine made under Nectanebo I, a king of the Thirtieth Dynasty who reigned from 380 to 362 BCE. The Naos of the Decades, carved for the temple at Saft el-Henna in the eastern Delta, was later broken up. One part has been in the Louvre since the nineteenth century; other pieces were raised from the bay of Abu Qir near Alexandria, the last of them by Franck Goddio's underwater teams around 2000. Reassembled in publication by Anne-Sophie von Bomhard in 2008, the shrine sets out the year decan by decan. For each ten-day period it shows the decan's image and describes what the decan does in its time, much of it concerned with striking enemies, spreading or averting death and protecting Egypt. It is one of the earliest texts to treat each decan as a power whose influence on human affairs could be read period by period, a step toward the astrological use of the decans that Hellenistic writers would complete.

Egyptian names in Greek mouths

When Greek-speaking astrologers in Egypt took over the decans, they took over the names too, written in Greek letters and worn down by the passage. Hephaistion of Thebes and other Greek authors give lists of thirty-six decan names, three to each sign, and some can still be traced back to their Egyptian originals. Sothis is Sopdet. The lion-headed serpent Chnoubis or Chnoumis, engraved on many healing gems, is usually derived from Kenmet, though some scholars have connected it with the ram god Khnum instead. The Greek lists are no more uniform than the Egyptian ones, and Latin and later Arabic copies added further distortions, so many names in the later tradition have no clear Egyptian ancestor. The point that survived was not the exact name but the idea that each decan had one, and that knowing it gave a person a hold on the god.

From gods to demons

In the early centuries CE the decans passed into Jewish and Christian magical writing, where they changed character once more. The Testament of Solomon, a Greek text whose surviving form is Christian, presents the thirty-six decans as spirits brought before King Solomon. They call themselves the world-rulers of the darkness, an echo of the Letter to the Ephesians, and each admits the illness it causes and the angelic name that defeats it. Here the decans are no longer gods to be honoured but demons to be bound, though their old functions survive under the new label: they still belong to the zodiac, still number thirty-six, and still bring or withhold disease. The pagan philosopher Celsus, quoted by Origen, attributed to the Egyptians a belief in thirty-six demons dividing the human body between them. From there the decans entered the healing magic of late antiquity, the subject of the next page.

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Egyptian decans

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