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News — An interest in understanding the role that the Milky Way played in Egyptian culture and religion has led University of Portsmouth Associate Professor of Astrophysics,  to uncover what he thinks may be the ancient Egyptian visual depiction of the Milky Way.

Various Egyptian gods are either associated with, symbolise, or directly embody certain celestial objects. In his , Dr Graur reviewed 125 images of the sky-goddess Nut (pronounced ‘Noot’), found among 555 ancient Egyptian coffins dating back nearly 5,000 years. 

Combining astronomy with Egyptology, he analysed whether she could be linked to the Milky Way and his findings are now published in the .

In scenes reflecting the day and night sky, Nut is shown as a naked, arched woman, sometimes covered with stars or with Solar discs. Nut’s arched posture is seen as evoking her identification with the sky and its protection of the Earth below.

As the goddess of the sky, Nut is often depicted as a star-studded woman arched over her brother, the earth god Geb. She protects the earth from being flooded by the encroaching waters of the void and plays a key role in the Solar cycle, swallowing the Sun as it sets at dusk and giving birth to it once more as it rises at dawn. 

However, on the outer coffin of Nesitaudjatakhet, a chantress of Amun-Re who lived some 3,000 years ago, Nut’s appearance deviates from the norm. Here, a distinctive, undulating black curve crosses her body from the soles of her feet to the tips of her fingers, with stars painted in roughly equal numbers above and below the curve.

Dr Graur said: “I think that the undulating curve represents the Milky Way and could be a representation of the Great Rift - the dark band of dust that cuts through the Milky Way’s bright band of diffused light. Comparing this depiction with a photograph of the Milky Way shows the stark similarity.”

He added: “Similar undulating curves appear in four tombs in the Valley of the Kings. In the tomb of  Ramesses VI, for example, the ceiling of the burial chamber is split between the Book of the Day and the Book of the Night. Both include arched figures of Nut displayed back-to-back and separated by thick, golden undulating curves that issue from the base of Nut’s head and travel above her back all the way to her rear.” 

“I did not see a similar undulating curve in any of the other cosmological representations of Nut and it is my view that the rarity of this curve reinforces the conclusion I reached in a study of ancient texts last year, which is that although there is a connection between Nut and the Milky Way, the two are not one and the same. Nut is not a representation of the Milky Way. Instead, the Milky Way, along with the Sun and the stars, is one more celestial phenomenon that can decorate Nut’s body in her role as the sky.” 

In  (April 2024), Dr Graur drew from a rich collection of ancient sources including the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, and the Book of Nut to compare them alongside sophisticated simulations of the Egyptian night sky and argue that the Milky Way might have shone a spotlight on Nut’s role as the sky in Egyptian mythology. 

It proposed that in winter, the Milky Way highlighted Nut’s outstretched arms, while in summer, it traced her backbone across the heavens. Dr Graur’s conclusions about Nut and the Milky Way have evolved since that initial paper. He said: “The texts, on their own, suggested one way to think about the link between Nut and the Milky Way. Analysing her visual depictions on coffins and tomb murals added a new dimension that, quite literally, painted a different picture.”

Both the current and previous studies are part of a larger project by Dr Graur to catalogue and study the multi-cultural mythology of the Milky Way. He said: “I chanced upon the sky-goddess Nut when I was writing a  and looking into the mythology of the Milky Way. My interest was piqued after a visit to a museum with my daughters, where they were enchanted by the image of an arched woman and kept asking to hear stories about her.” 

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For more information contact: Diana Leahy, PR and Press Officer, email: [email protected]

Notes to editors

The full article, ‘The ancient Egyptian cosmological vignette: First visual evidence of the Milky Way and trends in coffin depictions of the Sky Goddess, Nut’  can be read on the   website from 28 April 2025.

DOI  .

Biography of Dr Or Graur, Associate Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation 

Following his graduate studies, Dr Graur worked with Professor Adam Riess at Johns Hopkins University (2013–2014) and Professor Maryam Modjaz at New York University (2014–2016).

He then won an independent NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship, which he took to the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian (2016–2020).

Dr Graur conducts observational studies of supernovae and tidal disruption events. His main interest is figuring out the progenitors of Type Ia supernovae, which he pursues by measuring supernova rates, studying correlations with host-galaxy properties, and using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe nearby supernovae when they are hundreds of days old. His group also studies the host galaxies of tidal disruption events and the connection between these flares and rare extreme coronal-line emitting galaxies. 

He is also passionate about education and public outreach: in 2016, he founded the Harvard Science Research Mentoring Program, which sees early-career astronomers supervise high-school students in year-long independent research projects. The program, which he directed between 2016 and 2019, is still in operation.

Since 2011, Dr Graur has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed papers on these subjects, as well as two popular-science books: Supernova (2022, MIT Press) and Galaxies (2024, MIT Press). These books kindled an interest in the history of astronomy and in cultural astronomy. The current paper is the first product of an ongoing project to study the multicultural mythology of the Milky Way.

Dr Gruar is also an Honorary Associate Professor at University College London and a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History. Dr Graur completed his PhD in Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University in 2013.

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