Orion

Orion is the clearest case the atlas has of the same seven stars meaning three unconnected things, and all three readings are already rows here rather than a claim made up for the occasion.

Sah is the Egyptian figure at these stars, identified with Osiris. The Pyramid Texts place the dead king among the stars in Sah's company, and his heliacal rising each year is bound up with the return of Sopdet, the star Sirius, whose reappearance announced the Nile flood. Egyptian star ceilings show him as a striding figure looking back over his shoulder, holding a sceptre, with Sopdet behind him as a woman or a cow bearing a star between her horns.

Djulpan is the Yolngu canoe of Arnhem Land, formed from the same belt and sword the Greek list turns into a hunter. Three brothers went fishing, ate a fish forbidden to them, and were taken into the sky in their canoe with the fish and the flame of their fire; the belt is the brothers, the sword is the fish or the flame. The story marks a season and a rule at once.

Al-Jauza is the pre-Islamic Arabian figure at the same stars, a woman rather than a hunter, her name usually read as related to a root meaning the middle. Two of the brightest stars still carry her: Betelgeuse is a corruption of yad al-jauza, her hand, and Rigel is rijl al-jauza, her foot, fossils of a reading that lost to the Greek one but left its names in every modern star catalogue.

Orion is among the most brilliant and recognisable of all constellations, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, named for the giant hunter of Greek myth. Its distinctive form is unmistakable: the three bright stars of the Belt in a row, the red supergiant Betelgeuse at one shoulder, the blue-white Rigel at the opposite foot, and the Sword hanging from the Belt, where the great Orion Nebula glows. It dominates the winter evening sky of the northern hemisphere and has been recognised as a striding figure across many cultures. In myth Orion the hunter was slain and set among the stars, forever pursuing or pursued. In astronomical tradition it is a star pattern rather than a zodiac sign, though it lies just south of the ecliptic. These are the features of Orion as the classical and modern traditions describe it.

Orion's status as one of the very oldest recognised sky-figures is unusually well attested outside the Greek tradition: a hunter or a related figure appears in this same stretch of sky in Egyptian, Mesopotamian and many other independent traditions, most strikingly in the Egyptian identification of Orion's belt with the god Osiris, an association some archaeoastronomers have controversially connected to the layout of the Giza pyramids, a claim that remains disputed rather than established among Egyptologists.