Facts & layers · Middle Kingdom
A table of hours, not a row of personality signs
The diagonals only make sense when both axes stay visible: night hours down the side, ten-day periods across the year.
The ideal scheme
Read right to left, the decan names shift by one row from column to column and form the diagonals that gave the tables their modern name. Extra lettered “triangle decans” extend the pattern around the five days outside the twelve regular months.
The ideal is a research tool
McMaster's Ancient Egyptian Astronomy database warns that no surviving table follows the ideal exactly. The list can be reconstructed from a table, but that list is characteristic of that individual witness.
Museo Egizio now counts twenty-seven known tables and is undertaking the first complete critical re-edition of the corpus since the 1960s. That is why Bodhastra publishes thirty-six neutral positions but not a synthetic “official” set of ancient names.
Clock or table?
Museum labels often say “star clock” because the grid is connected to marking night hours. Some researchers prefer “diagonal star table” to avoid making the painted scheme sound like a mechanical instrument. Bodhastra keeps both search terms visible and uses “table” for the object.