Ram Symbolism in Egypt and the Hebrew Bible

Writers within the zodiacal ages framework point to ram symbolism clustering in sources roughly contemporary with the proposed Age of Aries window: the Egyptian god Amun, depicted ram-headed or with ram's horns, rose to particular prominence as a state god through the Middle and New Kingdoms, and the Genesis account of Abraham and Isaac has a ram, caught by its horns in a thicket, substituted for Isaac as the sacrificial offering. As with the comparable reading of the Age of Taurus, this is an interpretation applied after the fact by writers working within the ages scheme, not a claim that Egyptian or Israelite sources make about themselves in relation to a precessional cycle.

The proposed end of the Age of Aries, conventionally set near the turn of the era to make way for the Age of Pisces, is subject to the same uncertainty that affects every age boundary in this scheme: an even 2,150 year division and a constellation-boundary division do not agree, and different modern authors have proposed dates for the Aries-to-Pisces transition that vary by more than a century. Ram symbolism of this general kind was in any case widespread across the ancient Near East well beyond the proposed Age of Aries window, from earlier depictions of ram-headed deities in Egypt to ram imagery in Mesopotamian art, which is part of why mainstream biblical and Egyptological scholarship explains these sources on their own historical terms rather than through a precessional reading that only entered circulation many centuries later.