  The Milky Way's name and role in ancient Egyptian culture remain unclear. One
suggestion is that the Milky Way may have been a celestial depiction of the sky
goddess Nut. In this work, I test this association using an interdisciplinary
approach. In the first part of this paper, I combine astronomical simulations
of the ancient Egyptian night sky with primary Egyptian sources to map the
goddess Nut onto the Milky Way. With her head and groin firmly associated by
primary texts with the western and eastern horizons, respectively, I argue that
the summer and winter orientations of the Milky Way could be construed as
figurative markers of Nut's torso (or backbone) and her arms, respectively. In
the second part of this paper, I situate Nut within the global, multicultural
mythology of the Milky Way. Specifically, I show that Nut's roles in the
afterlife and the autumn bird migration are consistent with similar roles
attributed to the Milky Way by other cultures. Finally, I show that Nut's
identification with the Milky Way may even have echoes in contemporary African
conceptions of the Galaxy.
