Egyptian cosmology is oriented by the Nile rather than by the compass. South is upstream and is the direction one faces by default; the word for going north is to go downstream, and the word for going south is to travel by sail, because the prevailing wind blows against the current. When the Egyptians encountered the Euphrates, which runs the other way, scribes described it as the inverted water.
The sky is read the same way. Nut arches over the earth and the sun is carried along her body by boat, the day boat and the night boat, and the whole apparatus of the sky is a river journey. Sah and Sopdet appear in the southern sky in the season of the flood; Meskhetiu turns in the north and never leaves.
That gives the sky a clean division of labour. The southern sky is where the year happens, arriving and departing, tied to the river and to the resurrection of Osiris. The northern sky is where nothing happens, and its stability is the reason the dead want to go there.
The star clocks, the decans, the funerary texts and the temple orientations are all working from this one picture, and it holds with very little change for the better part of three thousand years, which is longer than any comparable scheme anywhere has lasted.