At https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-egyptians/ancient-egyptians-drew-the-milky-way-on-coffins-and-tombs-linking-them-to-sky-goddess-study-finds … normally, one would just accept the findings but in this case there is an alternative idea that has been long ignored by mainstream. Clube and Napier, two British astronomers, wrote two books and numerous articles, some of which appeared in SIS journals. The books are now hard to come by but they are, ‘The Cosmic Serpent‘ and ‘The Cosmic Winter’, published in the 1990s. Was it the Milky Way, a fairly faint object in the night sky, but visible in a more pronounced manner in certain months of the year, or was it something else. According to Clube and Napier, and several other astronomers with a long career in the discipline. Admittedly, going back to when they were much younger – and possibly brighter, or more forthright. They came out publicly in support of the former two and co-wrote articles on the subject. This is that a large comet, or centaur object, periodically entered the inner solar system and orbited around the Sun before moving back to the outer solar system. Its journeys around the Sun, like all comets, involved shedding mass – very large amounts of mass. Later, we learn there were actually two large comets doing this during the Holocene period, one of which is Halley, which is now almost defunct, and the other, a comet that has disintegrated – possibly 4000 to 5000 years ago. In other words, that event would have taken place during the Old Kingdom period of ancient Egypt. Much of the mythology goes back at least to the Old Kingdom – and before that. The Pyramid texts, for example, and the pyramids themselves. In the Clube and Napier scenario debris from what is now Comet Encke, as well as Comet Halley, accumulated on the plane of the ecliptic – from the point of view of an earthbound viewer. At the end of that plane we have the zodiacal lights – a mere shadow of what it might have been when the pyramids were built. It is still shaped as a triangle – a pyramid in the sky. It is not prominent nowadays of course, not as it would have been if two large comets were shedding material every now and then.
No criticism of the link itself as that is how one would naturally interpret what can still be seen in the sky. However, interpretations of Egyptian gods and goddessees always seem somewhat facile – even infantile. As if ancient people were in some way intellectually challenged – making a mound out of an ant hill. On the other hand, if their mythology reflected what they actually saw, and interpreted it in the best way by comparing the shape shifting ability of comets to be seen as animals in the sky, or their gods and goddesses as rampagiug beasts out of control and capable, periodically, of shattering the human world on the surface of the Earth, how else would they react? Possibly, by organising their impotency in the face of a periodically violent deity, by investing them with a religious reverance. Anything to appease the malignant forces out there – with offerings of food, sacrifices, and various rituals that developed in diverse locations around the world. The fear must have been so potent as it still exists in some religions even in the modern world. Appeasement of deity is central to many belief systems. Not only that but deity was associated with glory and brightness and magnificence. When you read ancient texts, such as Assyrian annals or Egyptian war reports the king, or pharaoh, is invariably likened to the god – who is described in distinct detail. Obviously, when the centaur or large comet disintegrated, leaving the faint body, Comet Encke, still following the same course, god gradually became invisible. Modern religions have arose on the backs of an invisible God – but still one that intervenes in human affairs. Herakles [Hercules] disappeared four thousand years ago but he was still able to project his presence at the end of the Late Bronze era – the Return of the Heruclidae [little bits of Herakles] = a meteor shower. Their are numerous Taurid streams out there that periodically pass close to Earth, each belonging to a major shedding of material from proto-Encke, and a somewhat lesser number of meteor streams that have been traced back to Comet Halley.
Why isn’t this common knowledge? Mainstream simply do not like to countenance the idea of catastrophism – however much evidence might be produced. The theory is out there for anyone to explore and the authors left it at that after coming across a brick wall of resistance. Their hope was that the theory would be picked up by later generations when the mainstream model become untenable – or when a rogue piece of one one of these comets, on an earth crossing orbit, brought the subject up in a way it could not be ignored anymore. So it rests. Asleep – but not dead.