seems simple enough. Yet if the average man of us will reflect
how little he knows, of his own knowledge, of the exact length of
the year, it will soon become evident that the appreciation of
the faults of the calendar and the knowledge of its periodical
adjustment constituted a relatively high development of
scientific knowledge on the part of the Egyptian astronomer. It
may be added that various efforts to reform the calendar were
made by the ancient Egyptians, but that they cannot be credited
with a satisfactory solution of the problem; for, of course, the
Alexandrian scientists of the Ptolemaic period (whose work we
shall have occasion to review presently) were not Egyptians in
any proper sense of the word, but Greeks.

Since so much of the time of the astronomer priests was devoted
to observation of the heavenly bodies, it is not surprising that
they should have mapped out the apparent course of the moon and
the visible planets in their nightly tour of the heavens, and
that they should have divided the stars of the firmament into
more or less arbitrary groups or constellations. That they did so
is evidenced by various sculptured representations of
constellations corresponding to signs of the zodiac which still
ornament the ceilings of various ancient temples. Unfortunately
the decorative sense, which was always predominant with the
Egyptian sculptor, led him to take various liberties with the
distribution of figures in these representations of the
constellations, so that the inferences drawn from them as to the
exact map of the heavens as the Egyptians conceived it cannot be
fully relied upon. It appears, however, that the Egyptian
astronomer divided the zodiac into twenty-four decani, or
constellations. The arbitrary groupings of figures, with the aid