Broken pottery pieces at a site in ancient Upper Egypt show 150 horoscopes for ordinary people in the region, revealing the location as a hub of astrological and astronomical activities thousands of years ago.
The corpus of horoscopes in Athribis, modern-day Sohag, is “the oldest, largest, and most complex one in existence from antiquity, both in Greek and Egyptian languages,” team member and horoscope specialist Marina Escolano-Poveda said in an interview.
Excavators on her team recently highlighted they had found 43,000 ostraca – inscribed ceramic pottery sherds – covering many topics. Work has been taking place since 2003 and publication of these ostraca is being readied relatively soon.
The work is jointly conducted by the University of Tübingen and the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, under the direction of Tübingen Egyptologist Christian Leitz. To learn more, Refractor spoke with Escolano-Poveda, who is a senior lecturer in Classics, ancient history and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. She published information about some of the horoscopes in 2022, in the peer-reviewed Journal for the History of Astronomy.
An edited version of the interview is below.
Refractor: What was the most significant part of the research?
Escolano Poveda: The Athribis-Projekt is undertaken as a holistic study of the site of Athribis, and among other areas, it has fully excavated, restored and conserved the temple of Ptolemy XII, and is currently working on the temple of Ptolemy VIII.
These ostraca were located in the strip of land between the temple of Ptolemy XII and the mountain that limits the site on the west, and in the area of the pylon or gateway structure of the temple of Ptolemy VIII.
Since 2019, more than 150 horoscopes have been found at Athribis, the great majority of them written by a single astrologer who lived and worked during the reign of [the Roman Emperor] Augustus. Most of the ostraca with horoscopes are concentrated in the area of the pylon of the temple of Ptolemy VIII, so this appears to have been where this astrologer worked—or at least, where his ostraca were stored. They record dates of birth that go back to the reigns of Cleopatra VII – the famous Cleopatra (believed to have reigned between 51–30 BC) – and her father Ptolemy XII.
The astrologer used a combination of the [Egyptian] demotic and hieratic scripts in his horoscopes. That indicates that he belonged to the priesthood, since at the time of Augustus, hieratic knowledge was restricted to the priestly class, and the use of demotic scripts was already becoming restricted to the temples.
The ostraca are written in black ink, and follow a fairly regular structure, with minor variations. They start with the date of birth of the person having his or her horoscope cast, including year, month, day, and hour of the day or night. People would have their horoscopes cast when they were already adults, perhaps for important occasions such as a marriage.
These horoscopes record the name of the person, and the place in which he or she was born. From this, we know that people from other towns came to the temple of Athribis to have their horoscopes cast, which appears to indicate that this temple was an important centre of the practice of astrology in the region.
Apart from horoscopes, other types of astral ostraca found include lists of astral-related words, lists of dates and positions of astral bodies, and procedure texts recording the cycle of planets.
Refractor: What new insights have you found from the new horoscope ostraca that are helping to understand the catalog more generally?
Escolano Poveda: So far in this 2025-26 archaeological season, we have found about 60 new astral ostraca. Most of them are horoscopes, and they offer further data to understand how our local astrologer operated at Athribis.
We also have a few horoscopes written by other people, which show slightly different kinds of data – generally more simple – and structures. This shows that there were various ways of practicing astrology at the site, or perhaps different modalities according to what the clients could afford. One of the important finds from this season is a procedure text for the planet Venus, which I am in the process of studying for publication at the moment.
Refractor: What other evidence shows the ostraca are part of a hub for astrological and astronomical activity?
Escolano Poveda: Apart from the astral ostraca, we have evidence of an astronomical ceiling in the temple of Ptolemy XII, which has been reconstructed, studied, and published by Daniela Mendel-Leitz. In it we find the latest monumental attestation of the important treatise of religious astronomy known as the Book of Nut, as well as pictorial representations of various celestial bodies.
Two tombs at the site, the Tomb of the Mayor and the Zodiac Tomb, contain astronomical ceilings – the latter including two pictorial horoscopes of the two owners of the tomb, dating to the end of the 2nd century CE. This shows that astrology was continuously practiced at the site for several centuries.
Refractor: What astronomy and astrology work was going on in similar areas in what we now call Egypt around the same time?
Escolano Poveda: We have astronomical and astrological sources from other sites in Egypt, dating to the Graeco-Roman period. The most important ones come from the area known as the Oasis of the Fayum. There, at the site of Narmouthis, another set of ostraca with horoscopes have been found. These, however, have much more simple data, constitute a much smaller corpus of just 46 horoscopes, and they date to a later time (2nd century CE).
The most important astronomical and astrological evidence from the Fayum comes from the site of Tebtunis. Here, a series of astronomical tables written both in Greek and demotic on papyrus, and a corpus of astrological treatises written in demotic also on papyrus, have been found. The astronomical tables contain data about the motion and position of various celestial bodies, and were used by the astrologers to calculate the horoscopes. The information in the horoscopes was then interpreted using the astrological treatises. These allow us to understand the kinds of things the people having their horoscopes cast wanted to know. The main topics are marriage and relationships, fertility, work and career, and health.
We have also so far discovered the first evidence of astrological physiognomies from Egypt. This means that the Egyptians believed that their physical appearance was also determined by the celestial configuration at their birth. These astrological physiognomies detail information such as the colour of the skin, the appearance of the face, size of ears, the height and built, the shape of birth marks, and even the colour of the testicles.
It’s fascinating to learn that many high-ranking priests from that time were bilingual. “We can therefore discard old ideas such as that the Greek side was the more scientific one – astronomy –and that the Egyptian one was in turn more superstitious – astrology,” said Poveda.
It is also very important, she added, to emphasize the crucial role of Egypt in the transmission of astral knowledge from Mesopotamia into the Mediterranean world: “The zodiac was created in Mesopotamia, and the Greeks probably first encountered it in Egypt. Egypt was the place where this astral knowledge was then developed, and was incorporated by the Greeks to their view of the cosmos. The practices and methods that we see already in the Athribis horoscopes would be used by astrologers in the centuries to come, going into the Middle Ages and the early modern period.”
