About the name

On the temple’s roof stands a small chapel to Osiris. Its ceiling carried a sky carved in sandstone: a disc of constellations held up by standing figures, with the twelve signs of the zodiac, the five planets then known, two eclipses, and the decans, the star groups Egyptians used to count the hours of the night.

It was carved around 50 BC, in the reign of Cleopatra VII. Its design draws on Babylonian, Egyptian and Greco-Roman astronomy at once: one sky, drawn by more than one culture. The relief was cut from the ceiling in 1821 and has been in Paris since 1822. It is now in the Louvre.

Its arrival started a quarrel. France’s leading scientists, among them Joseph Fourier and Jean-Baptiste Biot, tried to date the sky from the stars it shows and could not agree, and the question of its age became a public argument between science and religion. The young Jean-François Champollion settled it in the 1820s when he read a word in one of its cartouches as autocrator, a title of the Roman emperors. Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz tell the story in The Zodiac of Paris (2010).

Beside the temple stood a sanatorium. The sick came to bathe in its sacred water and to sleep there, hoping the goddess would send them a healing dream.