Ursa Major

The seven stars of the Big Dipper carry at least three independent identities in the atlas, and none of the other two is a bear.

Meskhetiu is the Egyptian reading: the foreleg, or in some renderings the adze, of a slaughtered bull. It is drawn on Egyptian star ceilings as a severed limb, connected with the god Set and with the opening of the mouth ceremony, in which an adze of the same shape is touched to a mummy's face so the dead may eat and speak again. The instrument and the constellation share a name on purpose, tying a funerary rite to the northern sky. From Egypt's latitude these stars never set, and the imperishable stars are where the dead king was understood to go.

Banat Nash is the Arabic reading, and it turns the same seven stars into a funeral scene of its own, unrelated to the Egyptian one beyond both being about death. The four bowl stars are Nash, a bier, and the three handle stars are the Banat Nash, the daughters of the bier, walking behind it in mourning. The middle daughter, Mizar, is shadowed by the faint star Alcor, called Suha in this tradition and used as a traditional test of eyesight.

Both readings are why so many stars in this part of the sky carry Arabic names in modern catalogues even though the bear itself is Greek: the naming survived a translation of the astronomy that the figure did not.

Ursa Major, the Great Bear, is one of the largest and most familiar constellations, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, containing the seven bright stars known as the Big Dipper, the Plough, or the Wain. Two of those stars, the Pointers, line up on Polaris and so guide the eye to the north. In Greek myth the bear is the nymph Callisto, transformed and set in the sky. The figure is circumpolar from northern latitudes, never setting, and turns endlessly about the pole. Its stars have carried a great weight of lore and navigation across many peoples. In astronomical tradition it is a star pattern rather than an astrological sign of the zodiac. These are the features of Ursa Major as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading of the sky.

Two of Ursa Major's near neighbours are seventeenth-century additions rather than ancient figures: Canes Venatici, the hunting dogs Bootes is shown leading, and Leo Minor, both credited to Johannes Hevelius in his posthumous 1687 catalogue, filling faint gaps around the Great Bear's flank that the Ptolemaic tradition had left as empty sky. Ursa Major is also one of the most widely recognised patterns across independent cultures worldwide, known as the Big Dipper in American usage, the Plough in Britain, and the Wain or wagon in older European tradition, and it corresponds closely to the Chinese Beidou, the Northern Dipper, an asterism with its own long independent history in Chinese astronomy and astrology quite apart from the Greek bear.