Showing posts with label Oxyrhynchus horoscopes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oxyrhynchus horoscopes. Show all posts

Saturday, 22 November 2014

An original ancient horoscope (from the Oxyrhynchus collection)!



It doesn't seem like much but the image you see above depicts a  miraculously preserved ancient horoscope! It is a horoscope in its textual form that was habitual in that period and it derives from the Hellenistic Egypt, which is the cradle of modern, "horoscopic" Astrology! There, the ancient Greeks (in collaboration with Egyptian, Jewish etc. priests and scholars) created two thousand years ago an incredibly sophisticated Astrology, which is the precursor to the one we are practicing today.

This horoscope was found in the ruins of the Hellenistic city of Oxyrhynchus (160 km south of modern Cairo), which is located on the banks of a Nile's tributary. In this region the holly egyptian fish which in Greek is called "oxyrhynchus" (sturgeon) was abounding, hence the name of the city (which was the third largest in Hellenistic Egypt). It is a horoscope written on papyrus, which remained relatively intact for 18 whole centuries because it was buried in the Egyptian desert sand - in some ideal that is for its maintenance conditions. In fact this papyrus was found - along with thousands of others and dozens of horoscopes - in the ancient rubbish dump of the city of Oxyrhynchus!